Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

A Writer’s Vital Gift to a Free Society: The Satanic Verses

1990. A new decade, freedoms rising — and while a writer comes out of prison to become president in one country, another writer is being hounded to death throughout the world.

As we move towards the end of the twentieth century we carry the abomination of the pillory of Salman Rushdie with us as the mark of Cain.

The ‘anniversary’ this week is not some celebration of the end of horrors that our century had overcome but the ghoulish reminder of a return of the repressed: the Nazi book-burnings of our time re-enacted only a year ago in an English city.

Salman Rushdie has not been seen for — how long? He has become one of the Disappeared, like those who vanished during a recent era in Argentina, and those who vanish under apartheid in South Africa. Repressive governments have the power to destroy lives in their own countries; when religions take over these methods, they have the power to terrorise, through their followers, anywhere in the world. The edict of the dead Ayatollah has jurisdiction everywhere, contemptuous of the laws of any country. Political refugees from repressive regimes can seek political asylum elsewhere; Salman Rushdie has nowhere to go. His oppression is unique. It is contemptible to read that some cultured people — including a few of his fellow writers — blame the victim for the savage and evil intolerance of his persecutors: he should have known that he would cause ‘offence’. And this ‘offence’ is equated with the counter ‘offence’ of destroying the book and pronouncing death on the author — a punishment he should have expected.

As for the wrigglings of ecumenical ‘understanding’ of the Muslim position, it is incomprehensible that anyone in modern times who believes in God, under any name or avatar, could ‘understand’ the claim of divine authority to destroy a writer’s creativity and end his life. No doubt the cry will go up: you are not a Muslim; you don’t know our faith. But no erudite citations of text from the Koran or any other holy work can alter the fact that the basic tenet of all religions is the love of God manifest in the brotherhood of man. What did this writer commit against man? Does his novel anywhere suggest that people should harm one another? Does he, through his characters, advocate racism, fascism, hatred? There is no line in his pages that does anything of the kind. If those who are still baying after him had the ability, unblinkered by their prejudices, to read this book with the intelligence it deserves, they would receive its rewards.

The Italian writer, Primo Levi, who disappeared into Auschwitz for years because his Jewishness offended against the good Christian Nazis, has described ‘a metamir … a metaphysical mirror that does not obey the law of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person who stands before you’. A writer is a metamir. What Salman Rushdie sees, of his people Indian and British, their mores religious and secular, is something to be faced, not smashed. The crime against Rushdie is also a crime against the artist’s vital gift to a free society, self-knowledge.

1990

Freedom Struggles out of the Chrysalis

1990. Euphoria: to be alive was — not exactly bliss, but certainly a high, as we saw and heard President de Klerk declare the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress and other liberation movements unbanned. The morning had begun with a more personal preoccupation for me and my three young comrades from the Congress of South African Writers. We’d set off early for the courts in Soweto, to attend a hearing of political charges against Mzwakhe Mbuli, our immensely popular musician and extraordinary poet-activist.

I took a small radio, so that we could hear de Klerk’s speech in the long wait that invariably comes before a case is called before the magistrate. But as soon as the court opened it was merely remanded to a later date. So, somewhat downcast, we found ourselves able to get back to the city in time to watch on television the de Klerk speech at the opening of parliament.

We sat with mugs of tea in a backyard cottage occupied illegally in a white suburb by a black man. (The pressure of population and the mood of confidence among blacks is breaking down city segregation.) Of the four of us, I, the white, was the only one with the right to vote for the three-colour parliament we were looking at. Of the three black men, Mxolisi Godana, Raks Seakhoa and Menzi Nbaba, Raks had spent five years as a political prisoner on Robben Island, and Menzi had endured months in solitary detention in 1988.

De Klerk’s address was skilfully divided for delivery alternately in English and Afrikaans. It was a cliffhanger. We waited a long time for him to come to any pronouncement on the banned organisations and Nelson Mandela. ‘That’ll be in English,’ Menzi predicted wryly; and when it came, it was — perhaps to ensure there would be no mistranslation for the outside world, perhaps to protect the Afrikaner right wing at least from the affront of hearing the Afrikaans language soiled by the expression of such a statement.

What we had been conditioned to expect of de Klerk, by the media and our own speculations, was the announcement of Mandela’s release. Put bluntly, Mandela is what the world wants from de Klerk in return for the lifting of sanctions. What Mandela and the Mass Democratic Movement want was somehow not in the barter. So it was with amazement, a singing in the ears, that we in that small room heard the leader of the South African government announce that the ANC, the PAC — even the South African Communist Party! — were henceforth unbanned.

We looked to one another, eager for confirmation — politicians are so clever, had we missed some catch? No. The plain words were coming out of the mouth of a South African white president. And I was hearing them in the company of three young blacks who were born after black liberation movements were banned at the beginning of the 1960s. They had never known what it was to have political loyalties and aspirations that do not break the law and lead to prison.

It was as if they were coming out of a chrysalis. Their movements, in the excitement, were the awkward ones of drying wings. Back-slapping and grasping hands wouldn’t do. Everything seemed inadequate to express an event with so many consequences.

Maybe later in the day, after we’d parted, they joined celebrating crowds, but there among the tea mugs, the exhilaration snatched at personal possibilities. Mxolisi’s mind flew to close friends in exile: ‘They’ll be able to come home! Bring their kids!’ And we swapped the names of our writers who could soon be among us, as well as the politicians, away for a lifetime. And Mandela. For us, as for the great and revered man himself, it had never been what would have satisfied the world — his messianic deliverance from apartheid — but the freeing of the people, no less. Of course, what de Klerk had conceded in meeting some of the conditions of the Harare agreement was less … but still so much. Our minds flew through the stages by which, once the ANC was free to organise and the exiles return, with Mandela and Sisulu and the others together in leadership, the remaining conditions for negotiation would follow. Inevitably. Unstoppably. We locked the cottage door behind us and walked out into streets that surely couldn’t, shouldn’t look familiar?

I stopped by a liquor store to buy some celebratory libation, and a white man waiting for his beer asked the proprietor whether he knew if anything had happened there in Cape Town today? The white man behind the counter hadn’t heard.

‘The ANC and the PAC are unbanned,’ I offered.

‘Oh my God, all hell’s going to break loose for us now!’ — the customer loped out with averted eyes.

‘Don’t worry, don’t worry!’ the white proprietor yelled after him, not wanting a customer to leave with a bad memory of a moment in his shop. And he turned to me: ‘I don’t know about you, but the trouble is we’ve been told and told, since I was a kid, we just the only ones, we just everything here.’

The morning after: the chaff of euphoria has blown away. I still believe the unbanning of the liberation movement is the real beginning of the great release. But studying de Klerk’s speech instead of listening to it, reading the comments of leaders at home and in exile, one sees what was left unsaid and undone. The President, dazzling us with the unbannings, said little or nothing about abolishing apartheid legislation. He did not speak of the Group Areas or the Population Registration Act; he did not touch upon the basis of apartheid that is under my feet as I write this — the land whose ownership remains forbidden to the blacks from whom it was taken by conquest, and by laws they had no part in making. The exiles my friends and I were so happy to welcome home, yesterday — some have already reminded us that they will not come back to live under apartheid laws of any kind, under apartheid justice. And I remind myself this morning that while de Klerk has said he is releasing Mandela unconditionally, he has not met all the conditions that Mandela himself set for his own release — in particular the repeal of apartheid laws.

The important move towards negotiated change that came about yesterday did so because of the growing power of the black people of South Africa to influence the economy and lifestyle of white South Africans, and the pressure of sanctions.

Mrs Thatcher is wrong when, in self-congratulation and hubris, she attributes change to her opposition to sanctions. Exactly the reverse is true. Without sanctions, there would have been no such speech in the House of Assembly yesterday. Within South Africa, we have to thank young people like the three with whom I heard the speech, who have never known freedom and have suffered imprisonment for a new South Africa; and in the outside world, we have to thank those who brought South Africa to some sense of reality through economic and political pressure, and who would serve our freedom best by continuing this policy until there are no gaps or silences in the momentous speeches to come.

1990

Sorting the Images from the Man: Nelson Mandela

I have just come home from the rally that welcomed Nelson Mandela back to Soweto. It was the occasion of a lifetime for everyone there; including the dot in the crowd that was myself, as one of the whites who have identified with the African National Congress through the years when it was a crime to do so. Overwhelmingly, the joyous gyrating mass that filled Soccer City Stadium, clung to retaining structures like swarming bees, even somehow hoisted one another up on old gold-mine headgear outside the fences, had been born and grown to adulthood — young whites as well as blacks — while Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison. Yet all that time there was no black child in whose face, at the mention of his name, there was not instant recognition. And there were no whites — enemies of the cause of black freedom as well as its supporters — who did not know who this man was. His body was hidden behind walls; his presence was never obliterated by them.

When Bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in the twentieth year of Mandela’s imprisonment, he said he accepted it for Mandela, for all prisoners of conscience, and for all those ordinary black people whose employers do not know their workers’ surnames. And on the day of Mandela’s release, when Dr Nthato Motlana, himself a symbolic figure of resistance, was asked whether he didn’t think Mandela should now come to live in Soweto ‘among his people’, Motlana said: ‘He’s not a Sowetan, he’s a South African. Wherever he lives in our country he is among his own people.’

That may have sounded like a grandiose put-down but it is strangely true. Apart from the Afrikaner right wing, whose fringe of Nazi crazies give the swastika on their flag a new twist and wave ‘Hang Mandela’ posters at each other, whites have not merely accepted Mandela’s return but turn to him now as the only one who can absolve and resolve: absolve the sin of apartheid and resolve the problems of reconciliation and integration. President de Klerk’s boldness in freeing Mandela has as its ironic obverse a fervent submission to this idea. He counts on Mandela: without him, the legendary bird rising out of the bars, blue-winged and with a sprig of olive held ready for three decades in its beak, the transformation of South Africa into a place where de Klerk’s white electorate can still live can’t be realised. The blacks’ personification of the hidden Mandela as the image of their ultimate liberation is superimposed by the whites’ picture of him as their salvation, forming a single image.

So there were the faded photographs of a tall young man with smiling eyes and an old-fashioned part in his hair, umpteenth-generation reproductions that looked like ectoplasmic evidence, and there was the vision of the generic hero who (our Che Guevara if not messiah) could never be dead even if, as sometimes seemed only too likely, he were to die unseen. On the cover of Time his Identikit portrait appeared in final apotheosis in the guise of a beaming idol, something between Harry Belafonte and Howard Rollins.

And then there walked out of prison a man unrecognisable as any of these. The real man, with a face sculpted and drawn by the spirit within himself enduring through thirty years, by the marks of incredible self-discipline, of deep thought, suffering, and the unmistakable confidence of faith in the claims of human dignity. An awesome face.

Now he’s here. He confronts us, the man among us. He spoke bluntly, in Soweto, to black and white, sparing us nothing. He cut through the adulation of the crowd to demand from blacks an end to violence between black people. He spelled out to whites their responsibility for the consequences of poverty, homelessness and unemployment caused by the laws they made and must abolish.

By contrast, few care to interpret in equally plain language the staggering responsibility that expectations lay upon Mandela. ‘Reconciliation’ in a ‘new South Africa’ by him ultimately means finding houses for hundreds of thousands of blacks whose needs dating back to World War II have never been met. It means finding the 4,000 skilled personnel the dwindling economy desperately needs, from among a population whose majority has received a hopelessly inadequate, segregated education. It means — turning up only one among monster problems the big buzzwords hide — transforming a police force and army which have been the brutal enemies of the people of South Africa for generations.

Big words: a kind of helplessness among whites — the government — has dumped on Mandela the problems of the moment as well as the long-term: violence, crowd control, black school attendance. The mantra is Mandela; the hum is everywhere, but does it really represent the guru? The man himself is not carried away. He reiterates firmly that ‘no individual leader’ can take on the enormous task of creating unity and remaking South Africa on his own, that any decision by which the bread of negotiation will be broken with the government will be made by the combined leadership of the ANC, of which he is ‘a loyal and disciplined member’. The onus rests on whites; they must accept the policies of the ANC as a standpoint for negotiation as they accept Mandela. And he makes it absolutely clear that whether there will be feast or famine at that symbolic table depends on the whites’ and blacks’ understanding of what the big words really mean if they are to spell a united, non-racist, democratic and free South Africa. Mandela doesn’t want to be worshipped. He wants the people of South Africa to remake themselves together. That’s his greatness.

1990

Censorship and its Aftermath

It has been a long time since censorship could be symbolised by the blue pencil; even the word processor with its superhuman capacity for total erasure won’t do.

We who read Index on Censorship and — in countries like my own, South Africa — the local pamphlets keeping track of what can’t be printed, read or said, know that over vast tracts of the world censorship actually has been maintained by laws far beyond the control of any duly constituted Board of Censors. The vision of retired persons trying out on one another what passages may be sexually exciting or cause trembling at the prospect of subversion of the state are not the principal threat to the word. With television’s banalisation of sex, half the mandate of the sedentary censor has gone the way of those dashes between first and last letters.

Political censorship has taken place of first importance since before the second half of our century. And it has been taken over, surely as never before, by the knuckle-duster imprisonment of writers and journalists, the banning of individual writers, the closure of newspapers, the prosecution of editors, the exclusion of television crews and journalists from the scene of events — all under laws that make conventional censorship appear namby-pamby. Repressive regimes from Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Franco’s, to Verwoerd’s and Botha’s, taking in so many others on the way, East to West, from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, have maintained themselves with these laws that, at first appearing ancillary to censorship, ended by rendering it old hat, almost redundant.

Coming as I do from a country which has regarded itself as part of the Western world (a claim somewhat in dispute …), you will forgive me if I take as my paradigm what has prevailed there, with emphasis on the immediate past.

Censorship in the conventional sense we have had with us since the early 1960s, with some amendments to the law, over the years, that made it worse. The right of appeal to the courts of law was removed, and with it the Western principle of the accused being innocent until proved guilty. Ever since, the author of a banned work — book, play, film — has been declared guilty of offence before he/she has the right to appear before the mock-up court of the Publications Appeal Board with its jury of ‘experts’ appointed by the Minister of Home Affairs. The institution of Appeal Board hearings was one of the first of many moves by which the rule of law has been bypassed as the South African white minority has twisted and turned its avowed ‘Western’ values to maintain apartheid power.

In 1988, 824 publications, films and objects (this usually means calendars and posters) were banned. Few of these bans applied to what, even in the broadest sense, we writers would term literature. The fact is that latterly the banning of serious literature, even that dangerous stuff, political non-fiction, as distinct from tracts, which are consistently banned, has become rare. A factor has been the worldly sophistication of the man who was the Chairman of the Board until April 1990, Professor Cobus van Rooyen. He realised that in a country where the masses are neither book-literate nor have libraries which would help them to become so, serious literature, whether by black or white writers, at home or from abroad, and no matter how potentially ‘inflammatory’, reaches only a section of the population that already has contact with such influences. But the principal reason for apparent leniency is that a vast proportion of the masses is newspaper-literate, media-literate, and therefore the focus of state information and thought control must be the media.

For this purpose, the Publications Control Board has no authority, nor is it needed. In 1989, under the provisions of the second and third of our successive States of Emergency, four newspapers and journals were threatened with suspension, two were closed down, fifty-two journalists covering a protest march were arrested and held for some hours; there were twenty-four separate trials with 198 defendants involving journalists and a few other writers, and there were dockets opened against journalists from a spread of ten papers, both alternative press and mass circulation, for infringements under the State of Emergency and its related Acts.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation also had no need of the Publications Control Board, or even the State of Emergency, in order to censor: it admitted that there were about a thousand songs ‘we just don’t play’, ranging from the soundtrack of Cry Freedom to George Michael’s disc, ‘I Want Your Sex’. I wonder whether the Cry Freedom track will ring out over the SABC, now that under the de Klerk regime of ‘new enlightenment’ the film has been released from ban; I don’t know whether George Michael’s plea will be heard …

In February this year, with President de Klerk’s unbanning of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and other political organisations prohibited since 1960 or earlier, the removal of a number of people from the list of those who may not be quoted, the lifting of gagging restrictions on other organisations and individuals, and the release of some political prisoners, a wall (on our side of the world, as well) was breached, and information and ideas dammed up for at least three decades began to flow in a way we had forgotten.

But as Gilbert Marcus of Witwatersrand University’s Centre For Applied Legal Studies⁵⁴ notes, ‘there remain over one hundred laws that restrict the free flow of information … the “new enlightenment” of February 1990 has left all of these laws untouched’. Journalists may be ordered out of an area or detained, organisations and the activities of individuals restricted. The Internal Security Act, with such powers, is still in force; the Police Act has severe controls on the reporting of police activity — my son, happening to have a camera on him when he dropped in to visit a friend in hospital last month, only just managed to talk his way out of arrest by attendant police when he paused to take a picture of a demonstration by hospital personnel on strike. There is the Prisons Act, which keeps what happens in prisons from public scrutiny, the Defence Act, which restricts reporting of any troop movements, and has on occasion made it possible for a military action never to be known about by the public, and the Protection of Information Act, which prevents the publication of information on virtually all official documents.

The Media Council, a conservative body, is now to review all legislative restraints on media reporting. ACAG, the Anti-Censorship Action Group,⁵⁵ is sceptical: ‘It remains to be seen whether this is an exercise to gain the backing of media people for the retention of some of these laws.’

The government complains that we in radical opposition to censorship always move the goalposts when the law scores a piecemeal reform.

Of course we do; and that is why we have made the gains we have in our determination to win freedom of expression. Early this year the extraordinarily courageous editor of a newly-launched Afrikaans weekly, Die Vrye Weekblad, ran away with the grim game against suppression of information by exposing the existence and connection with the police of the incredibly named ‘Civil Co-operation Bureau’ — the death squad which, over more than a decade, has murdered opposition activists, including lawyers and an academic. Taken up by other newspapers and arousing public outrage, the exposé led to revelations of Defence Force involvement in the death squads with the possible knowledge of members of the government. A judicial commission of inquiry, the Harms Commission, was set up. That, we must grant ‘the new enlightenment’, is unlikely to have happened during the Botha regime. And the sticky network of revelations consequent upon a single editor’s vigilance did not end there. Other papers took new courage in investigative reporting. Another commission, the Hiemstra Judicial Commission into ‘alleged’ irregularities in the Johannesburg City Council, revealed that the council has employed spies to infiltrate all manner of progressive gatherings to report who said what. In addition there were files kept on many vocal local citizens, including myself.

Mr Louis Pienaar, Administrator-General of Namibia, was out of a job when Namibia became independent; in April he was appointed new Chairman of the Publications Appeal Board. The daily newspaper, The Star,⁵⁶ reported that he is ‘widely regarded as an enlightened thinker in the field of the arts’, but gave no examples of people who do the regarding. ACAG⁵⁷ recalls that he was certainly ‘not noted for his support of the press’ during his tenure in Namibia. The Weekly Mail⁵⁸ reminds us that he will find himself faced with a mass of appeals for the unbanning of African National Congress and other liberation organisations’ media material; because of the ancillary laws I’ve cited, these have not been automatically released by the unbanning of the organisations themselves. We’ll see how Mr Pienaar deals with this long-suppressed expression of the ideas of a vast majority of South Africans. While declaring⁵⁹ that he sees his most important task as promoting ‘dialogue along with the changing circumstances in South Africa’, he wants to ‘make it clear … that violence and intimidation are not part of democracy, and where these appear in publications I will take very firm action’. Gilbert Marcus⁶⁰ comments: ‘Democratic principles are predicated on freedom of expression as a priority. And for this reason there has to be respect for views which are contrary, strident and militant. The proper discharge of Pienaar’s duties will also entail a recognition that people are generally moved to violence not by what they read or see, but because of the conditions under which they live.’

‘Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp?’ John le Carré’s statement,⁶¹ vis-à-vis the Rushdie case, surprised some people and disgusted others — including myself.

Yes, yes, we do believe that. It is surely one of the tenets of the stand against censorship that the abuse of human sensibilities — which is what pornography and pornographic violence are, since their content is lifted completely out of the complex context of life to which sex and strife belong — cannot be confused with works in which that complex context is encompassed in the creative spirit of exploration and daring. The object of the one is selective exploitation; that of the other is the writer’s huge and hazardous attempt to make sense of the whole of life.

We admit that it is difficult to protect society from the first while freeing the second. Yet the basic principle in doing so is to disavow the totally false equation. The task is to find a legal framework that will protect freedom of expression while dealing with the abuse of human sensibility, whether sexual, social or political.

This last — the political — is the great issue in South Africa. Albie Sachs, the African National Congress’s constitutional adviser and a fine writer, visualises for the post-apartheid future ‘an entrenched Bill of Rights in a constitution which declares certain fundamental rights and freedoms and establishes an independent judiciary to ensure they are maintained … Then, if parliament were to adopt any law, or if there were some executive act which abridged the freedom of speech in any unconstitutional way, a citizen could go to the courts and have that act struck down.’ We should ‘look at legislation in democratic countries throughout the world … study very carefully what they have done in relation to the limits of freedom of speech when it comes to racial defamation and incitement to racial hostility, and try to distil from that some kind of common minimum factor whereby the limits are set’. And he says what needs to be said for all of us, everywhere, who are concerned with the freedom of expression: ‘… the issues go well beyond speech. They touch souls.’⁶²

To turn more specifically to writers of literature. There is not one of us writing in South Africa today who has not either begun or spent the major part of a working life under conventional censorship and the chain-mail laws which reinforce it. While most have chafed at and some fiercely fought censorship, we have got used to it. To paraphrase Graham Greene, every country becomes accustomed to its own restrictions as part of its own violence. We have defied censorship and/or found ways round it. At the same time, inevitably, it has brought about deeper reactive consequences in our writers. And what is true of us is surely true of any other country where the very defiance of oppression creates defining restrictions of its own. I was in Hungary at a Wheatland Conference last year, and the session devoted to our host Hungarian writers revealed in them what I can only call fear of freedom — fear, for a writer, meaning not knowing how you are going to write next. Although they were overjoyed, as citizens, at their new freedom, they were bewildered about its meaning at the internal level from which the transformation of the entities of living into the writer’s vision takes place. With the head-clamps on the writer removed, there disquietingly is revealed — an aftermath of censorship I believe we’ve never considered — cramped and even distorted imagination.

For when I speak of the reactive consequences of censorship I am referring to the other pressure upon the writer that censorship calls into being. The counter-pressure of resistance also, ironically, screws down the head-clamp. Defiance of censorship and the regime it serves calls upon the writer to cut and weld his work into a weapon. It is necessary. But he may have to discard much of his particular insight in the process. It is impressed upon him that certain themes are relevant; certain modes are effective. Accustomed to the confines of allegory and allusion, our Eastern European colleagues now have to teach themselves the choice of numerous other modes to express life experience. Accustomed to the obsessive demands of choosing every situation and word for its trajectory against apartheid, South African writers will have to open themselves to a new vocabulary of life.

Many are ill-prepared, particularly the young writers. For everywhere where there has been censorship the counter-orthodoxy of resistance in literature has also come about. It has been an era when, in Brecht’s words, ‘to speak of trees is treason’. And to quote Albie Sachs again: ‘Instead of criticism, we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work, it is enough to be politically correct … It is as though our rulers stalk every page … everything is obsessed by the oppressors and the trauma they have imposed … What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?’⁶³

We must not think that when tyrants fall and there is a new constitution in his/her country the writer regains all that has been lost. It is not a matter of not having anything left to write about. Only those who jumped on the anti-apartheid and anti-communist bandwagons, having nothing in their baggage but the right clichés, will lose their dubious inspiration and need to find some other way of selling themselves. The real writers, on the contrary, will have the less sensational, wonderfully daunting task of finding the way to deal with themes that have been set aside in second place while writing was in battle dress — the themes of ‘humanity in all its forms’, human consciousness in all its mystery, which demand not orthodoxy of any nature, but the talent and dedication and daring to explore and convey freely through the individual sensibility. Many writers, constricted by censorship on one side and the orthodoxy of the anti-mode on the other, have never developed the ability to deal with anything outside the events and emotions their historical situation prescribed.

And what of the writer under that most damning form of censorship, exile?

Does the possibility of a return home for Kundera, Milosz, mean that the moment they set foot there the years of imaginative growth on their home soil, lost to them, will be instantly restored? Who can give to South African writers in exile, Dennis Brutus, Mongane Wally Serote, Mandla Langa, a whole roster of others, the experience of the life and languages of their own people — a writer’s bread and being — they have missed?

There is no form of censorship that does not affect a writer’s sensibility, whether suffered for years or as an isolated event. Commenting on the indecency case against Madame Bovary after he won it in 1857, Flaubert⁶⁴ writes of this and of another aftermath of censorship: the establishment of spurious literary values. ‘… my book is going to sell unusually well for a writer’s first. But I am infuriated when I think of the trial; it has deflected attention from the novel’s artistic success, and I dislike to be associated with things alien to it. To such a point that all this row disquiets me profoundly … I long to return, and forever, to the silence and solitude I emerged from; to publish nothing; never to be talked of again.’

Which brings me to the ghastly reversed fulfilment of that particular traumatic response among many that censorship calls forth in its distortion of a writer’s life. Salman Rushdie is not with us today, condemned to incarceration, silence and solitude, talked of endlessly under the cruellest and most depraved form of censorship this century has known, notwithstanding the Gulag. He is a writer of prodigious vitality and gifts, and nothing will stop him writing. But when he is free to live in the world again, nothing can give him back the time that evil religious fanatics took from him, and that the world allowed the perpetrators to take, nothing can restore to his novel, cleansed of the dirty fingerprints of those who manhandled it, raised from the ashes of those who burned it, the artistic attention that, alone, belongs to it.

While we rejoice at new freedom for writers in many countries long denied it, and work for freedom for writers in those countries where the many devices of censorship still prevail, some perpetrators carrying their gags and guns and book-burnings all over the world, we must also remember that writers are never freed of the past. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, for ever. Where censorship appears to be swept away in the rubble of toppled regimes, let us make sure that it does not rise again to the demands of some future regime, for the generations of writers who will grow up, anywhere in the new world in the making. As Barbara Masakela,⁶⁵ Secretary for Culture in the African National Congress, has said bluntly, and surely for all of us: ‘We are not prepared to see culture become a case of arrested development, frozen at the point of liberation. Nor will we be content with a culture vulnerable to becoming the fiefdom of some future oppressive ruling class.’

1990

Joseph Roth: Labyrinth of Empire and Exile

Strangely, while I have been writing about Joseph Roth, the wheel of karma — or historical consequence? — has brought Roth’s territory back to a re-enactment of the situation central to his work. In Roth’s novels — and supremely through the lives of the Von Trotta family in his masterpieces, The Radetzky March (1932) and its sequel The Emperor’s Tomb (1934) — we see the deterioration of a society, an empire, in which disparate nationalities have been forced into political unity by an overriding authority and its symbol: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Josef. There the rise of socialism and fascism against royalism led to Sarajevo and the First World War. After World War II the groups that had won autonomy were forced together again, if in a slightly different conglomerate, by another all-powerful authority and its symbol: the Communist bloc and the personality of Joseph Stalin. Now restlessness and rebellion, this time against the socialism that has not proved to be liberation, brings once again the breakup of a hegemony. Passages in Roth’s work, about the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, could with scarcely a change describe what has happened in Yugoslavia in 1991.

Roth: he looks out from a book-jacket photograph. Just the face in a small frame; it is as if someone held up a death mask. The ovals of the eyes are black holes. The chin pressed up against the black shadow of a moustache hides stoically the secrets of the lips. A whole life, in bronze, seems there. And there’s another image in that face: the huge sightless eyes with their thick upper and lower lids dominating the width of the face have the mysteriously ancient gaze of a foetus, condemned to suffer the world.

‘Je travaille, mon roman sera bon, je crois, plus parfait que ma vie,’ Roth wrote.⁶⁶ Prefaces to some translations of his books give the same few penny-life facts: born in 1894 in Galicia, served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, worked as a journalist in Vienna, Berlin and Prague, left for France in 1933, wrote fifteen novels and novellas mainly while taking part in the émigré opposition to the Nazis, died an alcoholic in Paris in 1939. I failed to find a full biography in English.⁶⁷ After having re-read all Roth’s fiction available to me, I am glad that, instead, I know him in the only way writers themselves know to be valid for an understanding of their work: through the work itself. Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author’s life before they can interpret the text.

Robert Musil, Roth’s contemporary in Austria-Hungary, although the two great writers evidently never met, put into the mouth of his Ulrich ‘One can’t be angry with one’s own time without damage to oneself’;⁶⁸ to know that Roth’s anger destroyed him one has only to read the great works it produced. The text gives us the man, not the other way around. The totality of Joseph Roth’s work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. No other contemporary writer, not excepting Thomas Mann, has come so close to achieving the wholeness — lying atop a slippery pole we never stop trying to climb — that Lukács cites as our impossible aim.

From the crude beginnings in his first novels, The Spider’s Web (1923) and Hotel Savoy (1924), the only work in which Roth was satisfied to use the verbal equivalent of the expressionist caricaturing of Georg Grosz or Otto Dix, through Flight Without End (1927), The Silent Prophet (1929),⁶⁹ and all his other works with, perhaps, the exception of the novellas Zipper and his Father (1928) and Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933), his anti-heroes are almost all soldiers, ex-prisoners of war, deserters: former aristocrats, bourgeois, peasants and criminals all declassed in the immorality of survival of the 1914–1918 war. This applies not only to the brutal or underhand necessity that survival demands, but also to the sense that, in the terrible formulation of a last member of the Trotta dynasty, they had been ‘found unfit for death’.

All the young are candidates for the solutions of Communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation. Their fathers are unable to make even these choices, only to decay over the abyss of memory. All, young and old, are superfluous men to an extent Lermontev could not have conceived. Women are attendant upon them in this circumstance. Roth, although he often shows Joyce’s uncanny ability to write about women from under their skin, sees them according to their influence on men. ‘We love the world they represent and the destiny they mark out for us.’ While his women are rarely shown as overtly rejecting this male-determined solution to their existence, they are always unspokenly convinced of their entitlement to life, whether necessity determines it should be lived behind a bar, in a brothel bed, or as an old grande dame in poverty. No better than the men, they connive and plot; but even when he shows them at their slyest and most haughtily destructive, he grants them this spiritedness. If one reads the life (his) from the work, it is evident that Roth suffered in love and resented it; in most of his work desired women represent sexual frustration, out of reach.

The splendid wholeness of Roth’s oeuvre is achieved in three ways. There’s the standard one of cross-casting characters from one novel to the next. There’s the far bolder risk-taking, in which he triumphs, of testing his creativity by placing different temperaments from different or (even more skilled) similar backgrounds in the same circumstances in different novels. There is the overall paradoxical unity of traditional opposition itself, monarchic/revolutionary, pitched together in the dissolution of all values, for which he finds the perfect physical metaphor: the frontier between Franz Josef’s empire and the Tsar’s empire, exemplified in Jadlowsky’s tavern, which appears in both The Radetzky March and Weights and Measures. There, the rogue Kapturak, a Jew whose exploitation of others’ plight stems from his own as a victim of Tsarist anti-Semitism, hides the Russian army deserters he’s going to sell to labour agents in America and Australia. The only contacts between men are contraband; commerce of this kind is all that will be left of the two monarchic empires fighting each other to a mutual death, and the only structure that will still exist in the chaos to follow; the early twentieth-century class struggle will arise from that.

Roth’s petite phrase in the single great work into which all this transforms is not a Strauss waltz but the elder Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, in honour of the Austrian field marshal who was victorious against Sardinia. Its tempo beats from the tavern through Vienna and all the villages and cities of Franz Josef’s empire, to Berlin in those novels where the other imperial eagle has only one head. For Roth’s is the frontier of history. It is not recreated from accounts of the past, as War And Peace was, but recounted contemporaneously by one who lived there, in every sense, himself. This is not an impudent literary value judgement; it is, again, the work that provides a reading of the author’s life. Here was a writer obsessed with and possessed by his own time. From within it he could hear the drum rolls of the past resounding to the future.

Musil’s evocation of that time is a marvellous discourse; Roth’s involves a marvellous evanescence of the author in his creation of a vivid population of conflicting characters expressing that time. His method is to show a kind of picaresque struggle on the inescapable chain of the state. He rarely materialises as the author. There is his odd epilogue to Zipper and his Father, apparently some sort of acknowledgement that this, his most tender book (for while their situation makes both Musil and Roth ironic writers, Roth is tender where Musil is detachedly playful), is a form of the obeisance to the past that is autobiography. And there is his prologue to The Silent Prophet, his most politically realistic and least imaginatively realised book. In this prologue he comes as near as he ever will to an authorial credo with respect to his pervasive theme, the relation of the individual to the state. He says his characters are not ‘intended to exemplify a political point of view — at most, it [a life story] demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end’.

The state or empire is the leg iron by which his characters are grappled. The political movement against the state, with the aim of freeing the people, in Roth forges a leg iron of its own by which the revolutionary is going to find himself hobbled.

Roth manages to convey complicated political concepts without their vocabulary of didacticism, rhetoric and jargon. In the bitter experiences of Franz in Flight Without End, disillusion with the revolutionary left conveys what must have been the one-time-revolutionary Roth’s own experience more tellingly than any research into his life could, and points to the paradox that runs through his novels with such stirring dialectical effect on the reader. The old royalist, capitalist, hierarchic world of church and state, with kings assuming divine authority on earth, their armies a warrior sect elected to serve as the panoply of these gods, is what he shows ruthlessly as both obsolete and bloodthirsty. But the counter-brutality of the revolution, and the subsequent degeneration of its ideals into stultifying bureaucracy — surely the characterising tragedy of the twentieth century — leads him to turn about and show in his old targets, fathers, mothers, the loyalist, royalist landowners and city fathers, enduring values in the very mores he has attacked. This hardly provides a synthesis for his dazzling fictional dialectic. One who came after him, Czeslaw Milosz, expresses the dilemma:

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic, in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.⁷⁰

The ten years between 1928 and 1938 seem to mark the peak of Roth’s mastery, although the dating of his novels in terms of when they were written⁷¹ rather than when they were published is often uncertain, since in the upheavals of exile some were not published chronologically. The Radetzky March (1932), Weights And Measures (1937) and The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) are both the culmination of the other novels and the core round which they are gathered to form a manifold and magnificent work. Zipper and his Father (1928) and Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933) are a kind of intriguing coda, a foray into yet another emotional range suggesting the kind of writer Roth might have become in another age, living another kind of life. Not that one would wish him any different.

Roth was a Jew in a time of growing persecution that drove him into exile, but as a writer he retained, as in relation to politics, his right to present whatever he perceived. Jewish tavern keepers on the frontier fleece deserters. There is a wry look at Jewish anti-Semitism. In Flight Without End a university club has a numerus clausus for Jews carried out by Jews who have gained entry and in Right and Left — a novel Roth seems to have written with bared teeth, sparing no one — there is a wickedly funny portrait of the subtleties of Jewish snobbism and anti-Semitism in Frau Bernheim; she conceals that she is a Jew but, as soon as someone at dinner seems about to tell a joke, she ‘fall[s] into a gloomy and confused silence — afraid lest Jews should be mentioned’. On the other hand, Old Man Zipper, like Manes Reisiger, the cabby in The Emperor’s Tomb, is a man with qualities — kindness, dignity in adversity, humour, love of knowledge for its own sake — and, yes, endearing Jewish eccentricities and fantasies, portrayed with the fond ironic humour that was inherited, whether he was aware of it or not, by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Fallmerayer, the country stationmaster, conceives a passion for a Polish countess who enters his humble life literally by accident (a collision on the railway line). It is an exquisite love story whose erotic tenderness would have had no place — simply would have withered — plunged in the atmosphere of Roth’s prison camps or rapacious post-war Vienna and Berlin. It takes place in that era, but seems to belong to some intimate seclusion of the creative imagination from the cynicism and cold-hearted betrayals that characterise love between men and women in most of Roth’s work. Helping to get the injured out of a train wreck, Fallmerayer comes upon a woman on a stretcher, in a silver-grey fur coat, in the rain. ‘It seemed to the stationmaster that this woman … was lying in a great white island of peace in the midst of a deafening sea of sound and fury, that she even emanated silence.’

The central works, The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb, are really one, each novel beautifully complete and yet outdoing this beauty as a superb whole. The jacket copy calls them a saga, since they encompass four generations of one branch of the Trotta family in Radetzky and two collateral branches in The Emperor. But this is no mini-series plodding through the generations. It is as if, in the years after writing Radetzky, Roth were discovering what he had opened up in that novel, and turned away from, with many dark entries leading to still other entries not ventured into. There were relationships whose transformations he had not come to the end of: he had still to turn them around to have them reveal themselves to him on other planes of their complexity. So it is that the situation between fathers and sons, realised for the reader with the ultimate understanding of genius in Radetzky, is revealed to have an unexplored aspect, the situation between son and mother in Emperor. And this is no simple mirror image; it is the writer going further and further into what is perhaps the most mysterious and fateful of all human relationships, whose influence runs beneath and often outlasts those between sexual partners. We are children and we are parents: there is no dissolution of these states except death.

No theme in Roth, however strong, runs as a single current. There are always others, running counter, washing over, swelling its power and their own. The father — son, mother — son relationship combines with the relationship of the collection of peoples in the empire to a political system laid as a grid across their lives; and this combination itself is connected to the phenomenon by which the need for worship (an external, divine order of things) makes an old man with a perpetual drip at the end of his nose, Franz Josef, the emperor-god; and finally all these currents come together in an analysis — shown through the life of capital city and village — of an era carrying the reasons for its own end, and taking half the world down with it.

Though fate elected him [Trotta] to perform an outstanding deed, he himself saw to it that his memory became obscured to posterity.

How unfailingly Roth knew how to begin! That is the fourth sentence in The Radetzky March. His sense of the ridiculous lies always in the dark mesh of serious matters. Puny opposition (a lone person) to the grandiose (an empire): what could have led to the perversity of the statement? And while following the novel the reader will unravel from this thread not simply how this memory was obscured, but how it yet grew through successive generations and was transformed into a myth within the mythical powers of empire.

The outstanding deed is not recounted in retrospect. We are in the battle of Solferino and with Trotta, a Slovenian infantry lieutenant, when he steps out of his lowly rank to lay hands upon the Emperor Franz Josef and push him to the ground, taking in his own body the bullet that would have struck the Emperor. Trotta is promoted and honoured. A conventional story of heroism, suitable for an uplifting chapter in a schoolbook, which it becomes. But Captain Joseph Trotta, ennobled by the appended ‘von Sipolje’, the name of his native village, has some unwavering needle of truth pointing from within him. And it agitates wildly when in his son’s first reader he comes upon a grossly exaggerated account of his deed as the Hero of Solferino. In an action that prefigures what will be fully realised by another Trotta, in time to come, he takes his outrage to the Emperor himself, the one who surely must share with him the validity of the truth.

‘Look here, my dear Trotta,’ said the Emperor, ‘… you know, neither of us shows up too badly in the story. Forget it.’

‘Your Majesty,’ replied the Captain, ‘it’s a lie.’

These are some of the most brilliant passages in the novel. Is honesty reduced to the ridiculous where ‘the stability of the world, the power of the law, and the splendour of royalty are maintained by guile’? Trotta turns his back on his beloved army, and estranged by rank and title from his peasant father, vegetates and sourly makes of his son Franz a district commissioner instead of allowing him a military career.

The fourth generation of Trottas is the District Commissioner’s son, Carl Joseph, who, with Roth’s faultless instinct for timing, enters the narrative aged fifteen to the sound of the ‘Radetzky March’ being played by the local military band under his father’s balcony. The DC has suffered a father withdrawn by disillusion; he himself knows only to treat his own son, in turn, in the same formula of stunted exchanges, but for the reader, though not the boy, Roth conveys the sense of something withheld, longing for release within the DC.

Brooded over by the portrait of his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, lonely Carl Joseph is home from the cadet cavalry school where he has been sent to compensate the DC for his own deprivation of military prestige. The boy is seduced by the voluptuous wife of the sergeant-major at the DC’s gendarmerie post. When she dies in childbirth, Carl Joseph, concealing his immense distress from his father, has to pay a visit of condolence to the sergeant-major, and is given by him the packet of love letters he wrote to the man’s wife. ‘This is for you, Herr Baron … I hope you’ll forgive me, it’s the District Commissioner’s orders. I took it to him at once after she died.’

There follows a wonderful scene written with the dramatic narrative restraint that Roth mastered for these later books. Devastated, Carl Joseph goes into the village café for a brandy; his father is there and looks up from a newspaper. ‘That brandy she gave you is poor stuff … Tell that waitress that we always drink Hennessy.’

One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together.

Outside the door of the District Commissioner’s office is Sergeant-Major Slama, helmeted, with rifle and fixed bayonet, his service ledger under his arm. ‘Good day, my dear Slama,’ says Herr von Trotta. ‘Nothing to report, I suppose.’

‘No, sir,’ Slama repeats, ‘nothing to report.’

Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel, Carl Joseph fulfils this dream only when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from a brothel wall a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor — that other image which haunts his life.

Roth reconceives this small scene at full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her ‘Collateral Campaign’ to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s son at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: ‘We all agree, my countrymen and I, that we ought to be glad the swine’s done for.’

Trotta, drunk, takes ‘heroic’ exception — ‘My grandfather saved the Emperor’s life … I, his grandson, will not stand by and allow the dynasty of the Supreme War Lord to be insulted!’ He is forced to leave ignominiously.

As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvellous subtlety what was withheld, and longing for release, in the father. The old District Commissioner’s unrealised bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is, first, merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.

The second set piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The levelling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The DC not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is to ask that Carl Joseph not be discharged in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph,

‘That’s the young fellow I saw at the last manoeuvres …’ And since this confused him a little, he added, ‘You know, he nearly saved my life. Or was that you?’

A stranger catching sight of them at this moment might have taken them for brothers … The one felt he had changed into a District Commissioner, the other, that he had changed into the Emperor.

The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin⁷² speaks of as ‘an extensiveness … of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes’.

Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before, the ‘Internationale’. At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the ‘innocent’ past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. ‘Lieutenant Trotta died, not with sword in hand but with two buckets of water.’

Carl Joseph’s cousin, of The Emperor’s Tomb, has never met him although Roth knows how to give the reader a frisson by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta links with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the DC, cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the DC with Jacques composed in a new key), Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cab driver. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his mega-novel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what has seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and post-war that contain them.

As with all Roth’s work, this phase is as wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfilment in the relationship between him and her. But The Emperor’s Tomb was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year of the next war for which all that was unresolved in the previous one was preparing in his world, his time. Although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and — for me — the summation of his work, with a scene in which Trotta is in a café. On that night ‘my friends’ excitement … seemed to me superfluous’ — as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history:

… the moment when the door of the café flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters … and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.

The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he calls to the vanished waiter. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over ‘uncanny crosses’ that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the Kapuzinergruft, the Emperor’s tomb, ‘where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi.’

‘I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Joseph … Long live the Emperor!’ The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’

I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that, for his own death, he collapsed in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.

1991

Turning the Page: African Writers on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century

In the beginning was the Word.

Over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuasion, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues.

In the twenty-first century, the word flies through space, bounces from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come. But its most significant transformation occurred for us — the writers — long ago (and it was in Africa) when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, when it materialised from sound to spectacle, from being heard to being read as a series of signs, and then a script; and travelled through time from parchment to Gutenberg. For this is the genesis story of the writer. It is the story that wrote you or me into being.

It was, strangely, a double process, creating at the same time both the writer and the very purpose of the writer as a mutation in the agency of human culture. It was both ontogenesis as the origin and development of an individual being, and the adaptation, in the nature of that individual, specifically to the exploration of ontogenesis, the origin and development of the individual being. For we writers are evolved for that task. Like the prisoner incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges’s story ‘The God’s Script’ who was trying to read, in a ray of light that fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the markings on the animal’s pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.

Writers in Africa in the twentieth century interpreted the greatest events on our continent since the abolition of slavery, from Things Falling Apart in the colonialist regimes, crossing the River Between oppression and liberation, passing Up in Arms through the Fog at the Season’s End, Down Second Avenue, singing the Song of Lawino on the Mission to Kala, overcoming Nervous Conditions and discarding the Money Order as the price of bondage, enduring the House of Hunger, challenging the World of Strangers created by racism, recognising we were shirking responsibility as Fools for Blaming ourselves on History. Confessing as An Albino Terrorist, telling as the Interpreters the Tough Tale of the struggle for Freedom.⁷³

There is no prize offered for correctly identifying the writers of the books whose titles you should recognise strung together to tell the story in the account I have just given, nor will it be necessary to point out that these titles and writers are only a random few of those that have made manifest in our literature the embattled awakening of our continent.

We have known that our task was to bring to our people’s consciousness and that of the world the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the media, the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We writers have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history.

The odds against developing as a writer able to take on this huge responsibility have, for most of our writers, been great. But as Agostinho Neto said, and proved in his own life: ‘If writing is one of the conditions of your being alive, you create that condition.’

Out of adversity, out of oppression, in spite of everything.

Before we look forward into the twenty-first century we have the right to assess what we have come through, and what it means to be here, this particular time and place that has been twentieth-century Africa. This has been an existential position with particular implications for literature; we have lived and worked through one of those fearful epochs Brecht has written of when ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime’. Our brothers and sisters have challenged us with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz’s cry: ‘What is poetry which does not serve nations or people?’ And we have taken up that challenge. Inevitably, the characteristic of African literature during the struggle against colonialism and, later, neo-colonialism and corruption in post-colonial societies, has been engagement — political engagement.

Now, unfortunately, many people see this concept of engagement as a limited category closed to the range of life reflected in literature; it is regarded as some sort of upmarket version of propaganda. Engagement is not understood for what it really has been, in the hands of honest and talented writers: the writer’s exploration of the particular meaning that being has taken on in his or her time and place. For real ‘engagement’, for the writer, is not something set apart from the range of the creative imagination at the dictate of his brothers and sisters in the cause he or she shares with them; it comes from within the writer, his or her creative destiny as an agency of culture, living in history. ‘Engagement’ does not preclude the beauty of language, the complexity of human emotions; on the contrary, such literature must be able to use all these in order to be truly engaged with life, where the overwhelming factor in that life is political struggle.

While living and writing under these conditions in Africa, some of us have seen our books lie for years unread in our own countries, banned, and we have gone on writing. Many writers have been imprisoned: Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Jack Mapanje, Jeremy Cronin, Mongane Wally Serote, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Jaki Seroke and a host of others. Many, such as Chinua Achebe and Nuruddin Farah, have endured the trauma of exile, from which some never recover as writers, and which some do not survive at all. I think, among too many, of Can Themba and Dambuze Marechera.

What has happened to writers in other parts of the world we cannot always dismiss as remote from being a threat to ourselves, either. In 1988, what the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis called the ‘fearsome rhythm of our time’ quickened in an unprecedented frenzy, to which the writer was summoned to dance for his life. There arose a threat against writers that takes its appalling authority from something more widespread than the power of any single political regime. The edict of a world religion had sentenced a writer to death.

For three years now, wherever he is hidden, Salman Rushdie has existed under the pronouncement upon him of the fatwa. There is no asylum for him anywhere. Every time this writer sits down to write, he does not know if he will live through the day; he does not know whether the page will ever be filled. The murderous dictate invoking the power of international terrorism in the name of a great and respected religion is not something that happens to ‘somebody else’. It is relevant to the themes that concern us, and will continue to do so, in African literature as part of worldwide post-colonial literature, for Rushdie’s novel is an innovative exploration of one of the most intense experiences we share, the individual personality in transition between two cultures brought together in that post-colonial world. For the future freedom of the word, and for the human rights of all of us who write, the fatwa of death must be declared an offence against humanity and dealt with by those who alone have the power to do so — democratic governments everywhere, and the United Nations. The precedent of the fatwa casts a shadow over the free development of literature on our continent as it does everywhere, even as we believe ourselves to be moving into the enlightenment of the twenty-first century.

What do we in Africa hope to achieve, as writers, in the new century? Because we are writers, can we expect to realise literally, through our work, that symbol of change, the turning to a fresh page?

What are the conditions under which we may expect to write — ideological, material, social?

It seems to me that these are the two basic questions for the future of African literature. I think it is generally agreed that consonance with the needs of the people is the imperative for the future in our view of African literature. This is surely the point of departure from the past; there, literature played the immeasurably valuable part of articulating the people’s political struggle, but I do not believe it can be said to have enriched their lives with a literary culture. And I take it that our premise is that a literary culture is a people’s right.

We shall all, as I have suggested, make the approach from our experience in the twentieth century; we shall all be hazarding predictions, since we do not know in what circumstances our ambitions for a developing literature will need to be carried out. We have our ideas and convictions of how literary development should be consonant with these needs of our people; we cannot know with what manner of political and social orders we shall have to seek that consonance.

I think we have to be completely open-eyed about the relations between our two basic questions. We have to recognise that the first — what we hope to achieve in terms of literary directions — is heavily dependent on the second: the conditions under which we shall be working as writers. A literary culture cannot be created by writers without readers. There are no readers without adequate education. It’s as simple — and dire — as that. No matter how much we encourage writers who are able to fulfil, according to their talents, the various kinds and levels of writing that will take literature out of the forbidding context of unattainable intellectualism, we shall never succeed until there is a wide readership competent beyond the school-primer and comic-book level. And where there are readers there must be libraries in which the new literature we hope to nurture, satisfying the need of identification with people’s own daily lives, and the general literature that includes the great mind-opening works of the world, are available to them.

Will potential readers find prose, poetry and non-fiction in their mother tongues? If we are to create a twenty-first-century African literature, how is this to be done while publishing in African languages remains mainly confined to works prescribed for study, market-stall booklets and religious tracts? We have long accepted that Africa cannot, and so far as her people are concerned, has no desire to, create a ‘pure’ culture in linguistic terms; this is an anachronism when for purposes of material development the continent eagerly seeks means of technological development from all over the world. We all know that there is no such workable system as a purely indigenous economy once everyone wants computers and movie cassettes. Neither, in a future of increasing intercontinental contact, can there be a ‘pure’ indigenous culture. We see, a plain fact all over Africa, that the European languages that came with colonial conquest have been taken over into independence, acquired by Africans and made part of their own convenience and culture. (Whites, of course, have never had the good sense to do the same with African languages …)

But we cannot speak of taking up the challenge of a new century for African literature unless we address the necessity to devise the means by which literature in African languages becomes the major component of the continent’s literature. Without this one cannot speak of an African literature. It must be the basis of the cultural crosscurrents that will both buffet and stimulate that literature.

What of publishing?

We write the books; to come alive they have to be available to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only through libraries, but also commercially. Many of us have experienced trying to meet the needs of the culturally marginalised by launching small, non-profit publishing ventures in African literature. We find ourselves stopped short by the fact that the distribution network, certainly in the southern African countries (I don’t imagine there is much difference in countries in the north), remains the old colonial one. Less than a handful of networks makes decisions, based on the lowest common denominator of literary value, on what books should be bought from publishers, and has the only means of distributing these widely to the public, since they own the chain bookstores that dominate the trade in the cities, and are the only existing bookstores in most small towns. In South Africa, for example, in the twentieth century, there have been and are virtually no bookstores in the vast areas where blacks have been confined under apartheid.

Another vital question: what will be the various African states’ official attitude to culture, and to literature as an expression of that culture? We writers do not know, and have every reason to be uneasy. Certainly, in the twentieth century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature — indeed, culture — has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defies them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. As writers, do we envisage, for example, a dispensation from a Ministry of Culture to fund publishing in African languages, and to provide libraries in rural communities and in the shanty towns that no doubt will be with us, still, for a long time? Would we have to fear that, in return for subvention, writers might be restricted by censorship of one kind or another? How can we ensure that our implicit role — supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there — will be respected?

Considering all these factors that stand between the writer’s act of transforming literature in response to a new era, it seems that we writers have, however reluctantly, to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be ours. We shall have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education — will our schools turn out drones or thinkers? Shall we have access, through our writing, to young minds? How shall we press for a new policy and structure of publishing and distribution, so that writers may write in African languages and bring pleasure and fulfilment to thousands who are cut off from literature by lack of knowledge of European languages? How shall we make the function of writers, whose essential gesture, the hand held out to contribute to development, is in the books they offer, something recognised and given its value by the governing powers of the twenty-first century? We have to begin now to concern ourselves with the structures of society that contain culture, and within which it must assert its growth.

And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, and African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs and secular rituals: the very stuff on which literary imagination feeds. The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pap is by now so deeply established among our people, and so temptingly cheaply purchased from abroad by our media — including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television — that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people, but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against the mega-subculture that, in my revised terminology in a vastly changing world, is the opium of the people.

Surely the powers of our writers’ imaginations can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We do not want cultural freedom to be hijacked by the rush of international subliterature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselves in the defeat of colonial cultures. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the page of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.

Albert Camus wrote: ‘One either serves the whole of man or one does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, he also needs pure beauty, which is the bread of his heart.’ And so Camus called for ‘Courage in one’s life and talent in one’s work.’ We shall need courage in our lives to take part in transforming social structures so that African literature may grow.

Gabriel García Márquez wrote: ‘The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.’ That goes for the peaceful revolution of culture, as well; without talent in our work, without ourselves writing as well as we can, we shall not serve African literature as we should.

I believe that the statements of Camus and Márquez and Neto (remember his words: ‘If writing is one of the conditions of your being alive, you create that condition’) might be the credo for all of us who write in Africa. They do not resolve the conflicts that will continue to come, but they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of writers squarely to their existence, reason-to-be, as a writer, and the reason-to-be, as a responsible human being, acting like any other within a social and political context. Bread, justice and the bread of the heart, which is the beauty of literature: these are all our business in Africa’s twenty-first century.

1992

Beyond Myth: Mandela’s Mettle

On Friday, in Oslo, Nelson Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with South African President F.W. de Klerk for their efforts to end apartheid.

Nelson Mandela is one of the world-famous today. One of the few who, in contrast with those who have made our twentieth century infamous for fascism, racism and war, will mark it as an era that achieved advancement for humanity. So will his name live in history, the context in which he belongs to the world.

Of course, we South Africans are part of that context and share this perception of him. But he belongs to us, and — above all — we belong to him on another and different level of experience.

There are those of us who knew him in childhood in his home, the Transkei, and see, beneath the ageing face formed by extraordinary experiences of underground and imprisonment, the soft contours of a lively youth unaware of the qualities within him beyond a commonplace appetite for life. There are freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives and are not with us to match the image of the leader, in the struggle they shared, with the statesman who has brought it to its fulfilment. There are those who see, superimposed upon his public appearances, his image in newspapers and on television today, the memory of his face, figure and bearing as he spoke from the dock when he was given a life sentence for his actions against apartheid, and declared a commitment he has lived up to since, many times, through many dangers: ‘I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’

It is a temptation to be anecdotal about Mandela. To speak, each of us who has had even some brief point of contact with him, of the pleasure of being remembered as well as remembering. For this man with the Atlas-like weight of our future borne on his erect shoulders does have what appears to be some kind of mind-reading facility to pick up identities, some card-index mnemonic system (perhaps developed in the long contemplative years in prison) that enables him to recognise people he may not have seen for years, or whom he may have met fleetingly during recent weeks of handshaking encounters. But this is no trick of political showmanship. Seemingly insignificant, it is a sign of something profound: a remove from self-centredness; the capacity to live for others that is central to the character.

He moves about our country now and is a flesh-and-blood presence to millions. For twenty-seven years he was imprisoned; in our midst — for Robben Island is in sight of Table Mountain, in Cape Town, and Pollsmore Prison is part of the city — and yet, in social terms, entombed. Silenced. Even his image removed; it was forbidden to reproduce his photograph in newspapers or other media. He could so easily have become legendary, his features recomposed as the icon of hopes that never would be realised and a freedom that always receded as each wave of resistance within our country was crushed and seemed defeated, and the outside world was indifferent.

But the people had a sense of his enduring what they knew: the harsh humiliations of prison were everyday experiences to black people under the apartheid pass laws and innumerable other civil restrictions that for generations created a vast non-criminal prison population in South Africa. When he and his colleagues were set to break stones and pull seaweed out of the Atlantic Ocean, ordinary people among the black population were being hired out by prison authorities as slave farm labour. His people kept him among them in the words of their songs and chants, in the examples of forms of resistance he had passed on to them, and in the demands for his release which were part of the liberation platform, maintained both by leadership in exile and the people themselves, at home. In such news of him that came out of prison, we came to know that his sense of himself was always part of all this, of living it with his people; he received them through prison walls, as they kept him with them. This double sense was intrinsic to the very stuff of resistance. The strong possibility that he would die in prison was never considered for acceptance. There never was the psychological defeat, for the liberation movement, of his becoming a mythical figure, a Che Guevara who might reappear some day only in mystical resurrection on a white horse, since once a personage becomes a myth he has disappeared for ever as a leader to take on the present in vulnerable flesh.

Of course, it remains difficult to write of a phenomenon like Mandela in terms other than hagiography. But he is not a god-like figure, despite his enormous popularity — and this popularity, in the era of successful negotiation between black and white, extends in all kinds of directions beyond the trust and reverence in which he is held by blacks and those whites who have been active in liberation from apartheid. I heard on the news while I was writing this that a poll of South African businessmen has revealed that 68 per cent wished to see Nelson Mandela as the future president of South Africa. Far from assuming a celestial status, Mandela’s quality is, on the contrary, so fully and absolutely that of a man, the essence of a human being in all the term should mean, could mean, but seldom does. He belongs completely to a real life lived in a particular place and era, and in its relation to the world. He is at the epicentre of our time; ours in South Africa, and yours, wherever you are.

For there are two kinds of leaders. There is the man or woman who creates the self — his/her life — out of the drive of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people’s needs. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other, it is a charge of energy that comes of others’ needs and the demands these make. Mandela’s dynamism of leadership is that he has within him the selfless quality to receive and act upon this charge of energy. He has been a revolutionary leader of enormous courage, is a political negotiator of extraordinary skill and wisdom, a statesman in the cause of peaceful change. He has suffered and survived more than a third of his life in prison and emerged without uttering one word of revenge. He has received many personal family sorrows as a result of his imprisonment. He has borne all this, it is evident, not only because the cause of freedom in South Africa for his people has been the breath of his life, but because he is that rare being for whom the human family is his family. When he speaks of South Africa as the home of all South Africans, black and white, he means what he says. Just as he did when he stood in court and vowed that he was prepared to die for this ideal.

As Aimé Césaire says, at the rendezvous of victory there is room for all. Mandela’s actions and words show he knows that without that proviso there is no victory, for anyone.

1993

Rising to the Ballot

What does an election mean in democratic Western countries? An election is a recurrent event of the social order, coming up like the obligation to fill out income tax returns. A day when, as a matter of routine in civic life, you go to make your mark in favour of the individual or political party whose policies for governing your life you believe will do this best. Unless one is oneself a politician, or actively campaigning for a political party, making that mark is not a major experience. I can project into this commonplace acceptance because, although I am a South African, I am white, and consequently I have had the right to vote since I was eighteen years old.

But because I am a South African, I also understand what I believe no one in the Western world can: what this week’s election in the year 1994 in our country signifies for the great majority of South Africans, the blacks who, by law, have never before been allowed to cast a vote. And because I have been a protagonist, in my way, in the struggle against the racism that found its base in denying blacks the vote, the right to have a voice in the governments that proscribed every aspect of their lives, I also share what this election means to black people. That is why I shall speak of ‘us’ instead of ‘them’ when attributing that meaning.

To us, the election signifies not just a new beginning. It is a resurrection: this land rising from the tomb of the entire colonial past shared out in different centuries, decades and proportions among the Dutch, the French, the British and their admixture of other Europeans; this indigenous people rising from the tomb of segregated housing, squatter camps, slum schools, job restrictions, forced removals from one part of the country to another; from the burial of all human aspiration and dignity under the humiliation of discrimination by race and skin; this people rising, for the first time in history, with the right to elect a government: to govern themselves. A sacred moment is represented in the act of putting a mark on a ballot paper.

Yes, there are high emotions involved in this election beyond the obvious political ones of the contest for power as a democratic process. How to transform the emotion people feel into enablement, the ability to use that process, is another matter. The generations of subjection have produced their own psychoses. It is difficult to convince people whose lives have been totally controlled by white employers and the authorities that served the interests of those employers that anything one commits to paper — a signature, a thumbprint — is not open to the scrutiny of the white baas and his agents.

This is particularly true of farm workers. The blacks who work on white farms, although distinguished from slavery by being wage-earners, have belonged literally body and soul to the white farmer. They and their families live by his favour on his land — the land they work for him — and if dismissed lose their homes as well as their jobs. It is not easy to give them the democratic faith to believe that their vote will be secret, not even the baas will know against what party’s name they made their mark. By the stroke of a pen in their own hand, they fear to lose whatever wretched security their lives have. Rural and urban people alike have been conditioned by something else, very different — one of the strategies of the liberation struggle that now, ironically, inhibits them from using the vote. One of the most successful campaigns against apartheid, adopted by both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress, was that of refusing to carry the pass. The hated dossier that blacks had to exhibit, like a shackle, on demand, and for which they went to prison on failure to do so, was the document that restricted their freedom of domicile and their right to seek work in one area rather than another.

From this anti-pass campaign came a wariness of all official documents that has remained long beyond the abolition of the pass. Having been told, then, by the liberation movements to protest against apartheid by not complying with government bureaucracy’s official records, many people retain a strong unconscious reluctance to apply for an identity document that each voter must produce at the polls.

Against this background, voter education has proved to be the essential first step in the curriculum of a new democracy. Very different from electioneering, voter education must teach people not for whom they should vote, but why they should exercise their rights through the vote, and how to do so. A number of organisations have been formed to provide this. Probably the most active, nationwide, is Matla Trust (‘Matla’ means strength in the Sotho language) on whose board I serve, and of whose activities I therefore can give account at first-hand, but which also are typical of the activities of such organisations in general, even if these do not share the same scope as Matla.

From its headquarters in Johannesburg, Matla serves a whole country of constituencies varied by many differences of language, levels of literacy, understanding of civic processes. With 60 per cent illiteracy among the people, the possibilities of voter education by the written word are limited. Using the daily press is the least effective of means. With a proliferation of languages — though many even illiterate black people speak three or four indigenous ones in addition to either English or Afrikaans, the official languages of the white regime — the task of reaching the population through oral programmes is a challenge. There is the great disparity between material possessions of urban and rural people. In the vast black townships around the cities, television sets are widely owned (some run on batteries, where electricity still has not been provided for black people), while in the rural areas a small transistor radio with restricted range is the only medium through which people can be reached in their homes. So that for the spoken word, and the spoken-word-plus-image, a separate approach is required.

Matla Trust has devised many strategies to reach responses to these problems. From the eleven branch offices around the country, field educators go out to villages, farms, factories, religious, youth and women’s associations to explain to people in their own languages what the casting of the vote means to their future, and how to do it.

Matla’s methods in this work have been so successful that the trust has run intensive courses to train field workers, as many as 500 at a time, from other voter-education programmes as well as its own. Brief informative dialogues, following the mode with which people are familiar in commercial advertising, are aired on radio stations. A fourteen-part TV mini-series featuring a popular black comedian was commissioned according to the ideas of the trust and has been shown on TV weekly at a peak hour in the run-up to the election. For the comic-book literate, a picture-story booklet in nine languages was distributed widely.

Perhaps the most original means of voter education has been the creation of six travelling theatre troupes of black actors who have both devised and acted a play, adapting it multilingually to areas and audiences throughout the country. I have seen the play evolve fascinatingly in response to the participation of audiences. With song and humour it presents a mock-up of a polling station, with the actors going through all the actual procedures — body-search for weapons, presentation of identity document, placing of hands under ultra-violet light and, after voting, into a special liquid, so that no one can vote twice — in the personae of various characters: the sceptical old crone, the swaggering youth carrying his deafening cassette player, the confidence trickster, the militant student, etc. People from the audience are invited to come up and make their mark on a board representing a ballot paper. The need for voter education has been startlingly clear when I have seen some cross out the names of parties they don’t wish to vote for.

A jazzy song and dance about ‘spoilt’ papers deals with this sort of confusion. However, one must not conclude the confusion about the voting process means lack of understanding of political issues; many thousands of people are politically aware and informed of party policies, while simply never having had the chance to practise ordinary civic procedures. Which is what voter education is all about.

Matla Trust, like other voter educators, has been funded by overseas aid organisations and governments wishing to promote a democratic future in South Africa. If there is the great voter turn-out now expected on election day, donors can feel satisfied that their money was well used, for without these imaginative and effective programmes a vast number of South Africans would have missed the first opportunity to exercise the right to govern their own lives.

Matla, for itself, knows that the task is not over. Voter education is only the first step towards democracy; all its other processes, in community organisation, in accountability from those who govern to the people governed, will need to be learned during the five years of a government of national unity that begins after this week’s election. Democracy is not an on-off affair; it has to be learned, day by day.

1994

Letter from South Africa

When I return to South Africa from abroad, now, I don’t step down on to the earth of my old stamping ground, the Transvaal, where I was born, but on to new territory. It’s named ‘Gauteng’ — ‘Place of Gold’.

The airport itself is renamed. It used to be ‘Jan Smuts Airport’, now it is ‘Johannesburg International Airport’.⁷⁴

The former name — Transvaal — of my natal region derived, way back, from the geographical boundaries recognised by the Boer Republics: Transvaal — ‘across the Vaal River’ — was where the water divided the Boer Republic of Orange Free State from its counterpart on the other side, the Boer Republic of Transvaal. The former name of the airport commemorated General Jan Smuts, one of the heroes of the white regimes, who led South Africa into the war against Nazi racism but continued to head a racist government at home.

Now ‘Gauteng’ stoutly asserts not only that there will be no more white republics here, but that their latter-day apartheid counterpart, the slicing and chopping of the country into ethnic enclaves is over, for good. If ‘Place of Gold’ trails any historical trappings, these commemorate the labour of the black men who brought the underground metal to the surface, and made the country rich, as much as the Europeans who made the discoveries and supplied the technology. In abandoning the naming of an airport for some people’s hero, I hope a principle is indicated whereby the naming of public utilities in honour of individuals will not be favoured — even if they are safely dead. The world is full of statues cast down on their broken noses, streets renamed for leaders celebrated and then deposed, requiring yet another street-name change, so that we may lose our sense of direction, in more ways than one. Of course I make an exception, in the inconsistent manner of all human beings. My exception is Nelson Mandela.⁷⁵ He is no transient figure in human progress; one of the few mortals, like Mohandas Gandhi, whose name is invoked and will be, and whose image is revered and will be, even by his enemies.

I’ve become easily accustomed to the new Johannesburg, but when I’ve been away and I come home, fresh to it, my vision flashes back to the way it was, for fascinated comparison. I’ve lived here since 1949, and at most levels of that segregation reserved for whites. I’ve been a struggling young writer, divorced, with a child to support. I’ve ended up in a beautiful old tin-roofed house with room for my books. But wherever and however I lived, during the past regimes, it was where no black person could rent a room, a flat, or buy a house. When I went into the central city, it was one vast, white businessmen’s club, with blacks coming in to run the errands, shine the doorknobs of the banks and insurance houses, sweep the streets, and keep out of any restaurant or coffee shop where clients could sit down. Of course they were more than welcome to spend their money in the businessmen’s shops — so long as they cleared off, out of sight, to their segregated black townships, after hours.

In the eighties, things began to change. People in other countries tend to think that the elections in April last year achieved this from zero, overnight. It was not so. During this time, libraries, theatres and cinemas had been declared by law as open to everybody. Blacks could sit down to eat in a restaurant. Public transport was desegregated, and although a lot of legalistic pussy-footing to retain residential segregation remained, it was simply ignored by the growing confidence of black people moving into white high-density areas, and white landlords eager to fill vacancies where whites had retreated to the suburbs. Gradually, in the suburbs themselves, that old solvent of prejudices, class solidarity, discovered for whites that black neighbours — lawyers, doctors, advertising executives, journalists, board members of white companies that were covering their backs for the future, followed the same approved routine of driving their children to private schools in the morning, and protected their property with the same intercoms installed at electronic gates. Back in the city, the white government’s lack of interest or success in providing transport to serve black people in their daily to-and-fro between the white city and the black ghettoes was replaced by a most disorderly but effective form of transport, provided by thousands of minibuses owned by black private enterprise.

These were the concessions made, and the changes helplessly accepted, by the last days of apartheid, holed up in its bunker but determined not to swallow the cyanide capsule.

The streets of Johannesburg’s city centre are now totally transformed. A perpetual crowd scene has taken over what was a swept, empty stage on which a few self-appointed leading actors performed for one another. The pavements are a market where your progress is a step-dance between pyramids of fruit and vegetables, racks of second-hand jeans, spreads of dog-eared paperback lives from Marx to Mandela, rickety tables set out with peanuts, sweets, sunglasses, backyard concoctions labelled Chanel and Dior, hair straighteners, Swatches and earrings. Traffic fumes are spiced by the smell of boerewors, a greasy farm sausage that is as much our national dish as thick mealie-meal, the African polenta, for on every corner there are carts frying circles of gut-encased meat over gas burners. You can have your shoes re-soled while you stand in your socks; you can even have your hair cut, right there. Like everyone else who has a car, I have had to acquire new skills as a driver, after forty-seven years on the road: the minibuses we call combis — a combination between a bus and a taxi — stop on request signalled by a raised finger anywhere and everywhere. You have to be ready with a foot on the brake and a quick swerve to make it to the parallel lane, and usually that lane is full, anyway.

The city centre is dirty, yes. That private white club, that stage-set for principal actors only, was not designed for non-members, the use of the crowd, the entire population of this city. The dainty bins overflow with trash. And perhaps there is even an unconscious euphoria among black people, in showing you can toss your cigarette pack and Coke can, even your old T-shirt, on to what whites kept so tidy, for themselves alone. It will take some time before people want to have clean streets because they have now claimed them.

I use the word ‘unconscious’ of this careless abandon in the streets because there is so little resentment of whites, in black South Africans. Not to be evidenced because, more importantly, simply not there, to be felt. I reflect on this as I write; but when I walk about Johannesburg these days I don’t do so as a white among blacks, I’m not conscious of this at all, it’s not there in the eyes, in the gait of people as they approach or pass me. And if we happen to bump one another, before I can apologise, the other will say ‘Sorry, ma-Gogo’, I apologize, Grandmother — in respect for my grey hair … I don’t know of any other city in the world I’ve been in where you’d meet such courtesy on the street.

There are muggings, hijacks and house robberies to fear. And although it is easy for me to say these are the hazards of city life in many countries, certainly the developing post-colonial ones, it is a statistical fact that our city ranks very high on the crime scale. In one of the paradoxes of freedom, our country is no exception. For all the years of apartheid, we were isolated from the world, rightly shunned; now we are accepted with open arms and we ourselves are also open to the arrival from other countries of drug dealers and scam-men, and on a humbler but nevertheless damaging level, illegal immigrants from as far afield as Nigeria, Korea and China who compete with our own unemployed in the struggle to earn and eat.

The vast number of unemployed we inherited from the apartheid regime, like the millions in need of houses and schools, have created an industry of crime, with, as apprentices, homeless street children. It’s a Dickensian situation apartheid bequeathed us and foreigners exacerbate, ironically, in our freedom. It’s an inheritance not only from the years of apartheid, since 1948, but of the more than three and a half centuries of colonial racist rule under different names.

What has the Government of National Unity been able to do about this inheritance, this social malediction, no less, in a mere eighteen months of its existence in power?

I am surprised, somewhat incredulous, when people in the outside world call us to account in the quantitative terms they have decided. How many houses have we built? Too few, yes, too few, we are well aware. But how many do these South Africa watchers calculate, of the thousands required by several million shack and slum dwellers, could be built in a year?

This is not a game of Monopoly, where a house is a counter you put down on a chosen square.

Do they realise that land has to be legally acquired, in relation to where people have their work, that electricity and water reticulation have to be installed where they never existed, that — above all — banks have to be negotiated into providing low-cost housing loans for people who, because they were black and low-income earners, never before were eligible for bonds? These preparations are what has taken up the time. The fact that in the region where I live eighty thousand existing houses have been connected to electricity may mean little to you, who have been taking for granted electrical power ever since you were grown enough to reach a switch; but to people who live in those eighty thousand houses, touching a switch is indeed the beginning of a new life: let there be light.

We still lack schools and teachers better qualified than apartheid turned out. But in January, when the school year begins in the southern hemisphere, something happened that heartens me whenever I contemplate the vast problems we have to tackle. The schools were desegregated. Black children in their brand new uniforms registered along with white children and there were no police, army personnel or dogs necessary to protect black children, as there had to be, you will remember, when the American South opened its schools to all races. When I happen to pass a local, once all-white school at the end of the school day and see small children streaming out, the girls giggling together, the boys scuffling and shouting together, I know that statistics are only part of progress.

We have had a great number of strikes this year. The most important ones are those in the mines and related industries, because they are bound up with the colonial-established employment practice of migratory labour, that, in turn, is related to the recurrent violence which spills from the frustrations of hostel living conditions to adjacent black communities; violence begun by the fanatical determination of the individual who represents a danger to peace in South Africa, Mangosutho Buthelezi, to stir ethnic differences in reckless pursuit of his personal political ambitions. Other workers have been on strike — supermarket employees, transport drivers, even grave-diggers. These actions are deplored because they affect production (not the grave-diggers, of course …) and growth of the economy, but we have to remind ourselves, this is democracy in action … Under the old regime, police, dogs and guns were the only answer to workers’ assertion of their rights.

Early this year I attended the inaugural sitting of the Constitutional Court. The case was brought by two men on death row, on the grounds that the death penalty violates South Africa’s new constitution. It was a test case of tremendous significance to the constitution as the final arbiter of individual human rights. Among the judges, black and white, was Albie Sachs, the liberation activist whose arm was blown off and one eye blinded by a car bomb placed to kill him by the apartheid government’s secret service; he, who might be thought to want to see assassins die, was eloquent for abolition of the death penalty. The court finally declared it a contravention of the constitution and it has been abolished. Eighty per cent of whites and 49 per cent of blacks, in a poll, had wanted it retained. Judge President Arthur Chaskelson said, ‘This court cannot allow itself to be diverted from its duty to act as an independent arbiter of the constitution by making choices on the basis that they will find favour with the public.’ We have, and need to have, this kind of protection of individual rights where we had so few. Those who kill will go to prison for life; the state will not become a murderer by killing them.

We have other kinds of murderers among us: political murderers who have never been brought to justice. In 1995 President Mandela signed into law a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a country of reconciliation’s preferred alternative to Germany’s Nuremburg Trials. Those who come forward and confess what they did in the past may be granted indemnity. It’s going to be a process full of questions and difficulties, both for the perpetrators of ugly and mortal deeds and for the families of those they killed or maimed. But it is surely a rare and civilised way of dealing with the past of a people who have to live with it, together. South Africa is a human place to live in, today.

1995

Cannes Epilogue

Forrest Gump as the culmination of a hundred years of the art of cinema: this appalling thought prompted me to accept an invitation to serve on the jury of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. I belong to the first generation for whom film has been an art form, along with literature, music, painting and sculpture, rather than a technical discovery, the cinematograph, made in 1895 by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. The century has been one of so much delight and revelation in the development of this unique medium. How could we allow it to be marked by a laurel wreath of confectioners’ sugar placed upon the head of the only hero an apparently weary civilisation, dwindled into sentimentality, could conceive of — a hero based on the premise that you have to be brain-damaged to be fully human in this world?

So I went to Cannes hoping for a masterpiece: a film that goes for all the possibilities in multimedia filmmaking; a film that extends boundaries already attained by the great makers, from Chaplin and Welles through Truffaut, Buñuel, Bergman and Bertolucci. (Everyone may substitute her or his own list of those I revere but have no space for.) Then there is, in the words of Satyajit Ray, ‘the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one (screenwriter, director, cameraman, actor) must catch in order to expose the larger things’.

I was intrigued to discover what the criteria of others on the jury might be. My companions under the president, Jeanne Moreau, were the French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, the Italian director Gianni Amelio, the African director Gaston Kaboré, the Mexican critic Emilio García Riera, the Russian screenwriter Maria Zvereva, the French producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, the French actor/director Jean-Claude Brialy, and John Waters, about whom no American reader will ask, ‘And who the hell is he?’

A mixed piece of casting — to some, even daring. The Times remarked that I might ‘just be the one person in the world with whom Mr Waters has least in common’. Well, the Times was wrong. Though we may have differed now and then about the nature of masterpieces, we laughed together such a lot that we thought of having a photograph taken of ourselves, suitably enlaced, for the press.

The seclusion of the jury was not quite on the level of that which was prevailing concurrently for a certain trial jury on another continent. But it was a relief to have strict rules to adhere to when journalists pestered us for tips about which film was out in front in the laps of jury viewing. An icon of cinema glamour, immensely intelligent, truly literate in many cultural dimensions, Jeanne Moreau was a president from whose discipline we would not have dared to stray in blab. Her personality is an unlikely combination, at once imperious and lovable. She worked us hard, yet never once did she try to influence the opinion of any jury member. For myself, I learned from the exchange of preoccupations with others. A cinematographer reads the language of images while I receive the language of the script, an actor intuits where performance betrays or transcends a role, directors see structure, and producers see how much ingenuity and imagination are achieved in proportion to a little or a lot of money spent. To become aware of all these component aspects was to understand better what film sets out to do and how far it succeeds.

Film may re-create the past or create a future, but in its flickering beginnings it was the unique art form to capture, alive, the continuing present moment. Not surprising, then, that two themes were obsessive in a number of the films we saw. One was the new nihilism — youths on two continents living at the dead end of our century on emotionless sex and catatonic violence. The second was the self-destruction of Sarajevo.

Twelve days spent seeing films and discussing them. The lives, the countries, the world created out of the imagination I entered became the real world. To emerge from the Palais des Festivals on to the beachfront and into the glare of a concerted gaze — that was fantasy. Cannes is a city of voyeurs. What are they hoping for as they press to the glass of the flag-fluttering cars? Their faces sag in disappointment: alas, I am not Sharon Stone. And if I were? What solace could I offer for the fate of looking on?

By the way, there was the masterpiece I had hoped for, and we gave it the Palme d’Or. In it was the presence of the essential thing in small detail, caught in order to expose the larger things. Emir Kusturica’s Underground is a splendid masquerade of life triumphant, in brass-band bravura, through half a century in the birthplace of the avatars of war which used to be Yugoslavia.

1995

Remembering Barney Simon

Theatre in South Africa without Barney Simon is unimaginable. With Athol Fugard — whose early plays he directed — back in the 1950s and 1960s, Simon broke the colonial mould of staging only those plays already applauded in the West End and on Broadway, discarded lack of confidence in our ability to judge theatre for ourselves, and opened the Brechtian road for South Africans to assert, as playwrights and actors, what Walter Benjamin called the ‘ability to relate their lives’; the tragedy and vitality, the defiant humour of poverty in the underworld of black townships that was, in fact, the real South Africa. During those years, it was the alternative theatre that kept the head of culture above engulfing apartheid. Where books were banned, the stage got away with the wily genre of illusion. Barney Simon was one of the founders of the Market Theatre, and from its beginnings in 1976 in the converted buildings of what had been our Johannesburg Covent Garden he put into its survival and growth as alternative theatre his very life. No one knows how many men and women who have become the makers of a unique black theatre and a unique non-racial theatre in South Africa, known over the world, come from his vision and patient energy as director/writer. His attitude was always not only to teach others what he knew, but — that was the brilliance of it — to draw from them what was deep in the streets and in themselves.

I remember, decades ago, Barney Simon came by and asked if I would like to come with him to meet two young men who were keen to devise a play. They were Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema, and they had the germ of an idea in two out-of-works chatting in a graveyard where the great African National Congress leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli was buried. He got them to explore the idea, probing into the content; he told them to go home to Soweto and talk about it to street traders, crones, youths hanging around the bus stations, gangsters, taxi drivers, anyone — and come back with their gleanings a week later. From this material he nurtured their great talent as actors to shape with them Woza Albert (Come back, arise Albert), a marvellous work using music, mimicry, irony and stand-up comedy in a message of liberation. The play was the first of many successes for Mtwa and Ngema, a prototype of the new theatre, to be created by them and their contemporaries, that showed the world outside what the statute-book version of apartheid was really like in terms of black people’s account of their own lives.

Simon was artistic director of the Market Theatre for virtually all his life, producing his own plays, international works and adaptations of others’ stories — Can Themba’s The Suit is one of them, running in London now — and in the last decade devoting enormous energy to the Laboratory, part of the Market’s theatre complex, where aspirant playwrights could develop and stage their plays under his superbly creative guidance. What was Barney Simon like as a man? In contrast to his masterly professionalism in the theatre, he was often bamboozled by the mechanisms of daily life: a sort of endearing Woody Allen character, defeated by burst pipes, car breakdowns, and, in human relations, open to exploitation in his kindness to anyone with a hard-luck story. He was a loving and loved friend; the theatre was his family. Wherever theatre flourishes in this free South Africa his work helped bring about, his spirit will be present: Woza Barney! Viva Barney!

1995

Our Century

Ahundred years is the largest unit we can grasp, in terms of human life. After a hundred years, quantification begins again; it is not without significance that life is renewed in the Sleeping Beauty’s family castle after one hundred years. The turn of a century is the prince’s kiss of time. On the first morning of 2000, the world will be awakened to a new calendar, perhaps a new life.

What has ours, our life in the twentieth century been?

Living in the twentieth century, we cannot look upon it from the pretence of another perspective; nor should we try to if we are to discover what only we, if secretly, suppressedly, know best: the truth about ourselves, our time.

Has it been the worst of times?

Has it been the best of times?

Or should we combine the two extremes in Dickensian fashion, and try ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?

The brief conception of our century I propose now is inevitably subjective; each of you will substitute or add your own, but there are surely many we, shaped by the same period, share.

At once there arises from a flash brighter than a thousand suns the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century. Exploded almost exactly at the half-century, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki rise as unsurpassed evil done, even in this century where more humans have been killed or allowed to die of starvation and disease, by human decision, than ever before in history; and where the Nazi holocaust, fifty years on, has become household words of horror as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and Africa.

Unsurpassed evil laid at our door, certainly, because foremost of the ‘firsts’ our century can claim is that for the first time man invented a power of destruction which surpasses any natural catastrophe — earthquake, volcano eruption, flood. Thus the final conquest of nature, an aim pursued with the object of human benefit since the invention of agriculture in the Stone Age, has been achieved in our discovery of how to wipe ourselves out more quickly and efficiently than any force of nature. The demonic vow of our century seems to come from Virgil: ‘If I cannot move Heaven, I will stir up Hell.’

The signing of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is brokered among nations, and the threat of an atomic war, which for forty years depended on the press of a button in the Pentagon or the Kremlin, is complacently half-forgotten since one protagonist in a Cold War is hors de combat. But the French, in this last decade, have tried out their nuclear capacity as if these loathsome apocalyptic weapons were now old toys a safe world can play with reminiscently.

T.S. Eliot’s prediction was that we would end with a whimper; ours is that we could go out with a bang. The mushroom cloud still hangs over us; will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

The strange relation between the forces of Good and Evil has been part of the mystery of human existence since we evolved as the only self-regarding creatures in the animal world. In our century, with its great leaps into what was formerly beyond human experience, the relation surely has become profoundly relevant and more inexplicable than ever. Einstein, exiled from his home country by the evil force of Nazism, split the atom, deciphering one of the greatest secrets of nature. What was intended to enrich humankind with an extension of knowledge of its cosmic existence, produced out of Good the malediction of our time: atomic capability, in whomsoever’s hands it remains or passes to.

What is more puzzling and far more troubling is what appears to be a kind of symbiosis of Good and Evil. They pass from one into the other through some transparency we, bewilderedly, cannot fathom. We try to apply moral precepts to processes that function perhaps according to quite other laws, laws in which this human construct of ours, morality, does not exist at all. A sober contemplation for an age characterised by revolutionary scientific discovery.

If we turn away from the absolutes of opposing Good and Evil as we must see them while human values are to survive, we come to the lower level — of paradox. We have made spectacular advances in discoveries that have made life more bearable for some and more pleasurable for others. We have eliminated many epidemics and alleviated much pain with new drugs; we have raised the dead in a real sense, by taking vital organs from the dead and planting them to function again in the living. Air travel has revolutionised the possibility of physical presence. The bundle of telecommunications — computer, fax, email, mobile phone — has speeded up communication by the spoken and written word. We have lifted the burden of manual workers and housewives by machines programmed to do onerous tasks; with other devices we have brought music and moving images into every house. We have broken the sound barrier, explored space, entered the angels’ realm, the sphere of the heavens. Most of us have enjoyed some of these embellishments of life.

The Italian Futurist painters in the early decades of our age depicted in their imagination this world which is now ours as a world of sleek cars whirling unhampered through streets, planes buzzing like happy bees gathering the nectar of a new age between skyscrapers and rainbows in a radiantly clear sky.

Their paintings look to us now like the work of a Grandma Moses of industrialisation; yet we shared this innocent ignorance of pollution, lacked with these artists the true vision of the future, which was that we would begin to choke on our technological progress, suffocate in our cities in our own foul breath of fumes and carcinogenic vapours. We have achieved much, but we have not always stayed at the controls of purpose.

It is also intriguing to observe in ourselves how technology has intervened in the intangible, telescoping our emotions. Those antipodean states, dread and anticipation, have been practically outdated. In our century, the ordeal of dread is banished by instant full communication from anywhere to anywhere. And as for anticipation, that becomes instant gratification. So, not for the first or last time, the advances of technology contradict theories of human satisfaction expounded by the savants of that other kind of advance in knowledge that has dramatically distinguished our century, psychoanalysis. Apart from its purely sexual application, Freud’s deferred pleasure as a refinement of emotional experience does not compare, for us, with the immediate joy of hearing a lover’s voice, or getting a friend’s reply to a letter, at once, by email.

Even adventurism has been transformed by technology. The intrepid of the Euro-Russo-American world walk on the moon and dangle in space instead of ‘discovering’ jungles and rivers the indigenous inhabitants have known as home since their personal creation myths explained their presence there. The new adventurers actually experience, by weightlessness, extinction while still alive, become phantoms whose feet cannot touch earth. They are the successors to the angels we, alas, no longer believe in because we have probed outer space and found no heaven.

What has been the impact on the arts, in our century of unprecedented technological development?

Technology is the means by which one of the positive, progressive consequences of the revolutions of the century — bloody or peaceful, failed or surviving — the determination to break open the elitism of the arts, has been made practical. From the era of troupes of actors and art exhibitions travelling through the villages of Russia after the October Revolution, to this decade of the nineties when villages and even squatter camps in Africa, in India, in the Middle East, have transistor radios, and television sets are run on car batteries, culture in its most easily assimilable form — entertainment sugaring information — has been democratised. There has been a redistribution of intellectual privilege through technology.

Music has been brought to the masses by discs, and broadcasts which may be heard on the humblest of radios, whether it be pop or reggae or an opera performance many people would never have had the money or opportunity to attend. And by the same means a recognition and appreciation of the musical forms of the East and of Africa, from the ragas of Ravi Shankar to South Africa’s kwela and mbaqanga, have spread internationally.

But it is television that has brought about the overwhelming cultural transformation.

Television has altered human perception. It has changed the means of knowing; of receiving the world. Of the five senses, sight now outstrips all others; watching is the most important form of comprehension. Although television speaks, it is its endless stream of images out of which the child, the youth, even the mature and old who have had considerable direct experience of life, construct reality. The visual other world of television is renewed in palimpsest, day after day, night after night, for millions the last vision before sleep and the first woken to in the morning. I know that every workshop of young painters in my country shows strikingly the imprinting of artists’ creativity by television’s imagery, iconography, television’s visual hierarchy of what is meaningful in our life. Television has empowered the visual far beyond the capacity of the cinema, the art which democratised the enjoyment of leisure before the TV box entered homes. Through television, the service of technology to art developed in our century, we have produced a human mutation, a species that substitutes vicarious experience for the real thing.

‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ These are the words of Thomas Mann, one of the greatest literary interpreters of the real thing, which he lived through in personal experience of the twentieth century’s physical displacements and upheavals of perception.

But we are not only children of our time, we are also of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. My personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world. When I was a toddler I was taken to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.

Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in, and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be important to the struggle for freedom by black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in that flag I was given to wave.

It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa this century has just seen.

A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised for many — now a fallen star, the Red Star, flickered out.

Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre, socialism was seen as ‘man in the process of creating himself’. The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the broad Left, the ideals of socialism remain although these have been betrayed and desecrated in many countries as well as in the Gulags of the founding one — it is this sense of abandoment that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion many in the West would triumphantly claim.

For whatever one’s judgement of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organisation of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution of 1917, as a result of which one-third of humankind found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again in many parts of our world today?

I can affirm that in my own country, South Africa, the Left’s revelation of the class and economic basis of racial discrimination was one of the formative influences that, along with Pan-Africanism, joined the people’s natural, national, inevitable will towards liberation. The other formative influence on the liberation struggle in South Africa is one of which I have already spoken, Mahatma Gandhi. He was one of the truly great individuals of our century whose lifetime within it we set against the monsters, from Hitler to Pol Pot, the century has produced. Gandhi was an original thinker on the nature of power, as distinct from power confined to the purely political concept as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness. His philosophy of satyagraha, ‘the force which is born of truth and love’, is perhaps the only genuine spiritual advance in an era of religious decline marked by crackpot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism.

What Mohandas Gandhi began, out of a philosophy formulated in South Africa and applied tactically in India to bring about freedom from British imperial rule, Nelson Mandela has concluded. For Nelson Mandela’s unmatched, unchallengeable prestige and honour in the world today is recognition not only of his achievement, with and for his people, in the defeat of the dire twentieth-century experiment in social engineering called apartheid. It is recognition that other ghastly forms of social engineering tried in our century were defeated where they had taken refuge, for apartheid with its blatant racist laws was an avatar of Nazism. And finally, it is homage paid to Mandela in recognition that what was at stake was something greater by far than the fate of a single country; it was final victory gained for humankind over the centuries-old bondage of colonisation.

The sum of our century may be looked at in a number of ways.

The wars that were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance.

We could dip a finger in a dark viscous substance and write on the window of our time, OIL. Oil became more precious than gold; it has been the ‘why’ of many wars of our day; repressive regimes go unreproached by democratic countries who are dependent on those regimes for oil; men, women and children die, for oil, without knowing why.

In intimate human relations, we have won sexual freedom, and lost it — to Aids.

Freud changed emotional cognition and self-perception. Another kind of perception moved from Picasso’s Guernica to a Campbell’s soup can, to the Reichstag wrapped in plastic, illustrating our cycles: worship of force and destruction, worship of materialism, desire to cover up and forget these choices we have made.

Now that the deeds are done, the hundred years ready to seal what will be recorded of us, our last achievement could be in the spirit of taking up, in ‘the ceaseless adventure of man’,¹ control of our achievements, questioning honestly and reflecting upon the truth of what has been lived through, what has been done. There is no other base on which to found the twenty-first century with the chance to make it a better one.

1995

The Status of the Writer in the World Today: Which World? Whose World?

A few months ago I was a participant in an international gathering in Paris to evaluate the status of the artist in the world. There we were on an elegant stage before a large audience; among us was a famous musician, a distinguished sculptor, several poets and writers of repute, a renowned dancer-choreographer. We had come together literally from the ends of the earth. At this stately opening session we were flanked by the Director-General of our host organisation, the representative of a cultural foundation funded by one of North America’s multibillionaire dynasties, and France’s Deputy Minister of Culture. The Director-General, the representative of the multibillionaire foundation and the Deputy Minister each rose and gave an address lasting half an hour; the session, which also was to include some musical performance, was scheduled to close after two hours.

An official tiptoed along the backs of our chairs and requested us, the artists, to cut our addresses to three minutes. We humbly took up our pens and began to score out what we had to say. When the bureaucrats had finally regained their seats, we were summoned one by one to speak in telegraphese. All did so except the last in line. She was — I name her in homage! — Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer-choreographer from India. She swept to the podium, a beauty in sandals and sari, and announced: ‘I have torn up my speech. The bureaucrats were allowed to speak as long as they pleased; the artists were told that three minutes was time enough for whatever they might have to say. So — we have the answer to the status of the artist in the world today.’

This experience set me thinking back to another that I have had, on a deeper and more personal level.

In my Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, a year or two ago, which subsequently were published under the title Writing and Being, I devoted three of the six lectures to the writing and being each of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz and Naguib Mahfouz. Edward Said, himself another writer whose work is important to me, reviewed the book extremely favourably in a leading English paper, while yet taking me to task for my indignant assertion that Mahfouz is not given his rightful place in contemporary world literature, is never mentioned in the company of such names as Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, etc., and certainly not widely read even by those whom one considers well-read; I know that a number of my friends read his work for the first time as a result of my published lecture.

Mahfouz neglected? — Said chided me.

Mahfouz not recognised for his greatness in world literature?

What world did I define him by, what world did my purview confine me to in my assessment? In the literature of Arabic culture, the world of the Arabic language, Mahfouz is fully established in the canon of greatness and, in the populist canon of fame, while controversial, is widely read.

Edward Said was right. What I was conceiving of as ‘world literature’ in my lecture, was in fact that of the Euro-North Americans into which only a few of us foreigners have been admitted. Naguib Mahfouz is recognised as a great writer in the world of Arabic literature, of whose canon I know little or nothing.

But wait a moment — Said, I saw, had hit intriguingly upon a paradox. He was placing the concept of another ‘world literature’ alongside the one I had posited with my eyes fixed on Euro-North America as the literary navel-of-the-world. In the all-encompassing sense of the term ‘world’, can any of our literatures be claimed definitively as ‘world’ literature? Which world? Whose world?

The lesson Edward Said gave me, along with the lesson provided by Mallika Sarabhai at the gathering in Paris, is a sequence, from the situation of artists in general, on the one hand, to the question of literary canons, on the other, that becomes the naturally relevant introduction to my subject, here among my brother and sister African writers: our status, specifically as writers, in the worlds-within-‘the world’ we occupy.

Status. What is status, to us?

First — it never can go without saying — the primary status must be freedom of expression. That is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other climate, the thin air of exile.

Suppression of freedom of expression by censorship and bannings was in many of our countries a feature of colonial regimes — I myself was such a victim of the apartheid government, with three of my own works, and an anthology I collected of South African writers’ works, banned. Suppression of freedom of expression has continued to be a feature of not a few of our independent regimes, leading outrageously and tragically in one of them, Nigeria, to the execution of one writer and the threat of death sentence placed upon another. But thankfully, in many of our countries, including mine, South Africa, and yours, Ghana, freedom of expression is entrenched.

Freedom to write. We have that status; and we are fully aware that it is one that we must be always alert to defend against all political rationalisations and pleas to doctor our search for the truth into something more palatable to those who make the compromises of power.

Quite apart from the supreme issue of human freedom, our claim to freedom to write has a significance, a benefit to society that only writers can give. Our books are necessary: for in the words of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol,⁷⁷ they show both the writer and his or her people what they are. ‘The writer is both the repository of his people’s ethos, and his revelation to them of themselves.’ This revelation is what regimes fear, in their writers. But if our status as writers is to be meaningful, that fear is proof of our integrity … And our strength.

Status, like charity, begins at home. The modern movement of African writers to define their status in this century was within our continent itself. With the impact of colonialism and its coefficient industrialisation, the keeper of the word — one who is marked for expression of the creative imagination with the ‘ring of white chalk’ round the eye by Chinua Achebe’s old man of Abazon, in Anthills of the Savannah — with the impacts of colonialism the traditional status of the keeper of the word, the griot, was not, could not be adapted as a status for one whose poetry and stories were disseminated to the people-become-the-public at the remove of printed books, remote from any living presence of their creator in the flesh, their origin in the creative imagination. The keeper of the word became invisible; had no ready-defined place in society.

I am not going to reiterate, or rather regurgitate, the history, including the influence from the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, that both preceded and coincided with the first congress of African writers and artists in 1956.⁷⁸ And it is significant, in terms of progress, to recall that it was not held in Africa at all, but in Paris.

I am looking at the modern movement from the distance made by events between then and now; from the epic unfurling of Africa’s freedom from colonial rule in its many avatars, way back from Ghana’s, the first, forty years ago, to South Africa’s, the latest and final one.

In the broad sweep of hindsight one can see that Kwame Nkrumah’s political postulation of Pan-Africanism had its cultural equivalent in the movement of negritude. Negritude, as a word, has long become an archaism, with its first syllable — although coming from the French language — suggestive of the American Deep South. But the other invented word, with which the young Wole Soyinka cheekily attacked the concept, has remained very much alive because over and over again, in the work of many African writers, Soyinka’s iconoclasm has been proved mistaken. ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude’, he pronounced. But as each country on our continent has come into its own, in independence, the expression of Africanness, the assertion of African ways of life, from philosophy to food, has intensified: Africa measuring herself against her selfhood, not that of her erstwhile conquerors.

Africanness is fully established. So what status do we writers have, now, right here at home, in our individual countries?

Is it the kind of status we would wish — not in terms of fame and glory, invitations to dine with government ministers, but in terms of the role of literature in the illumination of our people, the opening up of lives to the power and beauty of the imagination, a revelation of themselves by the writer as the repository of a people’s ethos? Alongside the establishment of African values — which in the case of our best writers included a lack of fear of questioning some, thus establishing that other essential component of literature’s social validity — the criterion in almost all of our countries has been the extent to which the writer has identified with and articulated, through transformations of the creative imagination, the struggle for freedom. And this, then, indeed, was the role of the writer as repository of a people’s ethos. Today the status, if to be measured on the scale of political commitment, is more complex.

Yes, economic neo-colonialism is a phase that threatens freedom, in a people’s ethos. Yes, the greedy wrangles of the Euro-North American powers to manipulate African political change for the spoils of oil supplies and military influence are concerns in a people’s ethos. Yes, the civil wars waged by their own leaders, bringing appalling suffering — these are all part of a people’s ethos to be expressed, for now that our continent has rid itself of its self-appointed masters from Europe the sense of identity in having a common enemy has eroded and in many of our countries brotherhood has become that of Cain and Abel.

Between writers and the national state, the threat of death by fatwa or secular decree, from Mahfouz to Saro Wiwa and Soyinka, has become the status of the writer in some of our countries. Yet these and less grim political themes tend to be the mise-en-scène of contemporary writing on our continent rather than its centrality. Africanism itself is an economic and cultural concept rather than an ideological one, now. For writers, the drama of individual and personal relations that was largely suppressed in themselves, and when indulged in was judged by their societies as trivial in comparison with the great shared traumas of the liberation struggle, now surfaces. When we in South Africa are asked, ‘What will you write about now apartheid is gone’, the answer is, ‘Life has not stopped because apartheid is dead.’ Life, as it did for you in Ghana after 1957 and for all the other countries of our continent after their liberation, begins again. There is so much to write about that was pushed aside by the committed creative mind, before; and there is so much to write about that never happened, couldn’t exist, before. Freedom and its joys, and — to paraphrase Freud — freedom and its discontents, are the ethos of a people for its writers now.

So we have lost the status of what one might call national engagement that we had. Some few of us take on the responsibility to become writer-politicians — at random I think of poet Mongane Wally Serote, now in the Mandela government’s Ministry of Culture and diplomats, like your own poet, Kofi Awoonor. But there are unlikely to be any future Senghors, poet-presidents. And I ask myself, and you: do we writers seek, need that nature of status, the writer as politician, statesperson? Is it not thrust upon us, as a patriotic duty outside the particular gifts we have to offer? Is not the ring of chalk round the eye the sign of our true calling? Whatever else we are called upon to do takes us away from the dedication we know our role as writers requires of us. As the cultural arm of liberation struggles, we met the demands of our time in that era. That was our national status. We have yet to be recognised with a status commensurate with respect for the primacy of the well-earned role of writer-as-writer in the post-colonial era.

How would we ourselves define such a status?

What do we expect, of our governments, our societies, and in return expect to give of ourselves to these? I have personally decisive convictions about this, constantly evolving as the country I belong to develops its cultural directions, and I am sure you have your convictions, ideas. And we need to exchange them, East — West, North — South, across our continent; that, indeed, is my first conviction. We need to meet in the flesh, take one another’s hands, hear one another, at valuable encounters like this present opportunity under the banner of the Pan African Writers’ Association.

But you and I know that the best there is in us, as writers, is in our books. The benefit and pleasure of personal contact is, in any case, limited to a fortunate few. Much more importantly, we need to read one another’s work. We and the people of our countries need natural and easy access to the writings that express the ethos of our neighbouring countries: what they believe, what they feel, how they make their way through the hazards and joys of living, contained by what varieties of socio-political and cultural structures they are in the process of pursuing. Forty years after the first country — yours — to attain independence, in the libraries and bookshops of our countries you still will find, apart from works by writers of each country itself, only a handful of books by the same well-known names among African writers from other countries of our continent. Every now and then, there may be a new one, a Ben Okri who comes to us by way of recognition in Europe, along the old North — South cultural conduit. Without the pioneering work of Hans Zell, and the invaluable Heinemann African Writers Series, the publication of journals from the old Présence Africaine to those bravely launched, often to a short or uneven life, by writers’ organisations or publishers in our various countries, the cross-pollination of literature in Africa would scarcely exist where it should: among ordinary readers rather than the African literati we represent, here.

The best part of two generations has gone by since the African continent began its inexorable achievement of independence that has now culminated: a priority in our claim for the status of writers and writing in Africa surely is that there should be developed a pan-African network of publishers and distributors who will cooperate — greatly to their own commercial advantage, by the way — to make our writers’ work as prominently and naturally available as the Euro-North American potboilers which fill airport bookstalls. This does not mean that we should export potboilers to one another! It means that writing of quality which readers in your countries and mine never see, unless they happen to have the resources to come across and mail-order from specialist book catalogues, would be beside our beds at night and in our hands as we travel on buses, trains and planes. There is a publishing industry on our continent, varying in different countries, as re-evidenced, after earlier studies, in Hans Zell’s and Cecile Lomer’s 1996 work, Publishing and Book Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,⁷⁹ and I understand there has been recently established the resource centre, the African Publishing Network, APNET. I would suggest that such a network doesn’t yet exist, and welcome any such initiative to weave it.

You will say that the old obstacle of our Babel’s Tower of languages rises before an African network of publishing. But the fact is that colonial conquest, with all its destruction and deprivation, ironically left our continent with a short list of linqua francas that have been appropriated to Africa’s own ends in more ways than pragmatic communication for politics and trade. English, French and Portuguese — these three at least are the languages used by many African writers in their work — for good or ill in relation to national culture: that is another whole debate that will continue. These three languages have virtually become adjunct African languages by rightful appropriation; and the translation into them of African-language literature, which itself is and always must be the foundation and ultimate criterion of the continent’s literature, is not an obstacle but an opportunity. Where are the translation centres at our colleges and universities, where young scholars could gain deep insights into their own languages while learning the skills of translation? Here is a field of cultural advancement, cultural employment in collaboration with publishers, waiting to be cultivated. We have an OAU uniting our continent, sometimes in contention as well as common purpose, on matters of mutual concern in international affairs, governance, policy and trade; we need an OAC, an Organisation of African Culture to do the same for Pan-African literature and the arts. Only then should we have a ‘world literature’: the world of our own, our challenge to the title each culturo-political and linguistic grouping on our planet has the hubris to claim for itself.

Professor Lebona Mosia,⁸⁰ an arts academic in South Africa, recently reflected on our Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki’s concept of an African renaissance of roots, values and identity, remarking (I quote) that our people are emerging from an ‘imaginary history … whose white folks believed that South Africa is part of Europe, America (the USA) and Australia. Blacks have always recognised that they are part of Africa.’ The same ‘imaginary history’ of course applies to Pan-Africa, to the thinking of all ex-colonial powers.

Does Thabo Mbeki’s renaissance sound like a renaissance of negritude?

I don’t believe it is. Or could be. Circumstances in our countries have changed so fundamentally since that concept of the 1950s, when liberation was still to be won. The reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established, from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. One of the dictionary definitions of the wide meanings of renaissance is ‘any revival in art and literature’; as we writers take to ourselves the right to vary or add to the meaning of words, I would interpret the meaning of renaissance in Mbeki’s context not as reviving the past, whether pre-colonial or of the negritude era, but of using it only as a basis for cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that never existed before, because it is an Africa that has come through: emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome.

Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone’s erstwhile empire. Secure in this confidence, and open-eyed at home as I hope we shall be to the necessity to apply ourselves to developing Africa’s literary variety to and fro across our own Pan-African frontiers, it’s time to cross new frontiers on our cultural horizon, to turn the literary compass to measure whether we still should be pointing in the same direction towards the outside world.

Which world? Whose world? The North — South axis was the one on which we were regarded so long only as on the receiving end, and which, latterly, we have somewhat culturally reversed: African writers have won prestigious literary prizes in England and France, and even Nobel prizes; African music has become popular abroad, the international fashion industry presently has a vogue for somewhat bizarre adaptations of African traditional dress — well, Africa dressed itself up in Europe’s three-piece suits, collar and tie; now Europe wraps itself in a pagne, a dashiki, a bou-bou …

Of course we do, and should, retain our freedom of access to, appropriation of, European and North American literary culture. I believe we have passed the stage, in the majority of our countries, of finding Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Melville, irrelevant. I believe that, as writers and readers, all literature of whatever origin belongs to us. There is an acceptable ‘world literature’ in this sense; one great library to which it would be a folly of self-deprivation to throw away our membership cards.

What has happened is that the works of our own writers, imparting the ethos of our peoples, have firmly and rightfully displaced those of Europeans as the definitive cultural texts in our schools and universities.

But if you place the compass on a map you will see not alone that South — South and not North — South is our closer orientation, but that if you cut out the shape of South America and that of Africa you can fit the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa together, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle making a whole — the lost continent Gondwana, sundered by cosmic cataclysms and seas.

This romantic geographical connection is merely symbolic of the actual, potential relationships that lay dormant and ignored during the colonial period when our continent of Africa was set by European powers strictly on the North — South axis. Climate and terrain are primary experiences for human beings; many South American and African countries share the same kind of basic natural environment, which determines not only the types of food they grow and eat, but the myths they created, and the nature of city life they have evolved. Both continents were conquered by European powers, their culture overrun and denigrated. Both have won their freedom from foreign powers through suffering, and suffered subsequently under brutal dictators in internecine wars among their own people. Both bear a burden of their people’s poverty and confront neo-colonialism exacted in return for their need of economic aid. Finally, there is the strange reciprocal bond: with those communities in South America descended from slaves brought from Africa.

All this in common, and yet we know so little of South American writers’ work and life. Aside from some few big names, such as Borges of Argentina, Machado de Assis of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and now Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, we do not know the work of the majority of South American writers, with whom, in many ways, we have more existential ties than with writers in Europe and North America.

Industrialists and entrepreneurs are opening up their South — South routes of trade, matching the exchange of raw materials, processing and expertise which countries in South America and Africa can supply for one another. They are giving more than a side-glance away from the fixed gaze of North — South development. Earlier this year Mongane Wally Serote and I visited Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and there met writers from other South American countries, as well. All were eager to grow closer to their recognition that our literatures are reciprocal in the ethos of our many shared existential situations, from the colonised past to the development problems of the present, both material and cultural. If the industrialists and entrepreneurs are paying attention to the material reciprocity, why are we, as writers, not looking South — South in a new freedom to choose which world, whose world, beyond our own with which we could create a wider one for ourselves?

In our first concern, which is to develop an African ‘world literature’ as our status, we should keep well in mind the words of the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz.⁸¹ With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations of America, he writes, all civilisations — including China and Japan — have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. And the Congolais writer, Henri Lopez,⁸² in his novel, Le Lys et le Flamboyant, is speaking not only of the mixed blood of tribe, race and colour of many of our people in Africa, but of the interchange of ideas, of solutions to a common existence, when he writes, ‘Every civilisation is born of a forgotten mixture, every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored.’ The nurture of our writers, our literature, is a priority which should not create for us a closed-shop African ‘world literature’, a cultural exclusivity in place of the exclusion, even post-colonial, that has kept us in an ante-room of self-styled ‘world literatures’. Let our chosen status in the world be that of writers who seek exchanges of the creative imagination, ways of thinking and writing, of fulfilling the role of repository of the people’s ethos, by opening it out, bringing to it a vital mixture of individuals and peoples recreating themselves.

Finally, at home in Africa, in the countries of our continent, let Rosa Luxemburg’s definition be at the tip of our ballpoint pens and on the screens of our word processors as we write: ‘Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.’ Let the writer’s status be recognised as both praise-singer and social critic. Let us say with Amu Djoleto:⁸³

What you expect me to sing, I will not,

What you do not expect me to croak, I will.

1997

The Poor Are Always with Us: The Eradication of Poverty

These are the poles of perception between which we meet today. These are the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.

The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place); by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth) to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.

The second proposition refuses to accept poverty as part of human destiny. The United Nations General Assembly’s designation of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty is a mission statement in the true sense. It is surely the boldest expression of faith in human endeavour ever made. It comes from the most representative body in the world. It posits perhaps the greatest human advancement ever embarked upon, an adventure greater than any attempted in the progress of humankind since we could define ourselves as such. And most important, it produces convincing proof that the goal is attainable.

Beginning last year, the United Nations Development Programme has launched an exhaustive, worldwide initiative to debunk poverty as destiny; with its partners, the United Nations system, organisations of civil society, academic institutions, the private sectors and international donor community, research has been produced which identifies the extent and nature of poverty in its many forms — and destiny.

I do not propose to cite the statistics of the world of want. They are all here, devastating, in the invaluable publications of the United Nations Development Programme — the staggering material facts of race, racial prejudice, political and social administration, geography, gender, ethnicity, agricultural practice, technological practice, industrial production, health services — everything, from the drying up of a stream to the closing down of an arms factory — that produces the phenomena of poverty as lived by the world’s 1.3 billion poor.

When you read this evidence of physical, mental and spiritual deprivation, you can reach only one conclusion: poverty is a trap. Brought about by many factors other than the obvious ones you may always have had in mind, poverty is the nadir of disempowerment.

It is a disempowerment that has existed and does exist in democracies as well as dictatorships, links them, in a way we are reluctant to have to admit. The ballot box of free and fair elections has failed to empower the poor in most of the democratic countries. The dictatorship of the people failed to do so in most countries of the Soviet empire. And since the fall of Communism, the West’s claim of freeing those countries to the establishment of a market economy and prosperity means nothing to the old people who now beg in the streets of Moscow, as the homeless do in the streets of cities of the only great power left in the world, this United States of America. In Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, in India — where in this world except for the small welfare states of the North, are there not people in the nadir of poverty? No need to enter into ideological differences, no need to make any value judgements, here: each country has produced — or failed to end — the shameful human end product, poverty.

What is a decade, in terms of centuries of acceptance that the poor are always with us?

Our answer surely is that the world now has the knowledge, the scientific and technological ability to do away with most of the causes of poverty, and to turn around the consequences of causes it cannot prevent. There are identified practical means: what is needed is the money and commitment of governments, regional, national and bodies of world governance, to cooperate and carry out these means. And what is needed to bring this about is a roused awareness and admittance among the peoples of the world that whether there is proved to be life on Mars, and whether you may conduct your affairs electronically without leaving your armchair, the new century is not going to be a new century at all in terms of the progress of humanity if we take along with us acceptance of the shameful shackles of the past, over a billion men, women and children in poverty, and we offer only charity, that palliative to satisfy the conscience and keep the same old system of haves and have-nots quietly contained.

In view of this need for roused awareness I think it is important for us to consider, how do different people conceive poverty? How do they think about it? Historically, where did it begin?

In prehistory early humans lived by what we would call now a subsistence economy: you hunted, you gathered, and when these resources of your group ran out in one place, you moved on; only nature discriminated, making one area more salubrious than another, but there was space enough to make of this an advantage rather than a deprivation. It was with the arrival of surplus value that the phenomenon of rich and poor began; with the cultivation of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, when food was grown and could be stored instead of foraged and hunted, able to satisfy only short-term needs. As soon as there was more than sufficient unto the day, those who grew more than they could eat became the haves, while those whose harvest provided no surplus became the have-nots.

Basically, nothing has changed since then. Except that it is no longer possible for society to move on from one disadvantaged environment to a more salubrious one — the colonial era of the European powers was perhaps the last such movement to take place successfully, the final enactment of an obsolete solution to social problems. On an individual scale, immigrants in contemporary days generally find themselves received by locals with resentment as competitors in the labour market of the country of their aspirations, and quickly sink to a place among the poor of that country. Nothing much has changed, over the centuries, except that we have evolved what might be called a philosophy of acceptance of poverty.

Firstly, there is the question of different class perceptions of what poverty is, and how these are arrived at. There is the upper-class perception. There is the middle-class perception. And there is that of the poor themselves.

For the rich, any contingency that they themselves might sink into poverty is so remote that it need not enter their minds. They are also in the position of being bountiful so that, curiously, while they may be genuinely concerned about the existence of the poor, poverty is also a source of self-esteem. Do not be shocked by this remark; without the philanthropy of wealth, the manner in which the world has dealt with, alleviated, poverty up till now could not have been maintained at all. But this overspill of wealth is too sporadic, too personally dependent on what aspects of poverty, piecemeal, donors happen to favour, to be a solution.

I read recently that if the wealth of the ten richest individuals in the world were to be made available, the problem of the world’s 1.3 billion living in poverty could be solved. Well, one cannot expect these individuals to give up their wordly goods in toto for the world, any more than any of us, I suspect, are prepared to sacrifice our — we consider — reasonable privileges entirely for those who have none. What is asked is for those who possess and control great wealth to look at the economic structures in their countries which have made that wealth possible and yet have created conditions that make philanthropy necessary — regimes that have failed to establish the means, in adequate pay for work, in education and training, in environment, by which people may provide for themselves in self-respect and dignity. That is the thinking that will face the facts of redistribution of the world’s wealth.

The wealthy and powerful who control the consortiums and international companies, and the government agencies who plan with them, need to take responsible heed of the emphasis placed by the United Nations Development Programme on ‘putting people at the centre of development’, on the concept of development enterprises as not only or even primarily advancing the credit balance of a country and providing X number of jobs, but as the instigation of a series of social consequences that will affect the implicated community in many ways. What may put pay in the pockets of the income-poor this year may be offset, over their lifetime, by destroying their environment. Development becomes a dangerous form of social engineering it if discounts the long-term effects on social cohesion. Profit and loss, in the book-keeping of the eradication of poverty, will be a calculation of how many people’s daily lives can be entered, in the long term, on the credit column.

For the broad middle class, which includes the skilled working class in many countries, the possibility of descending to poverty is subliminally present. Their concept of poverty is tinged by fear, as well as by concern for those who suffer it: there but for the grace of God go I. A change of government, inflation, a form of affirmative action whether on principle of colour, race or simply replacement of older employees with the young — these contingencies threaten middle-class safety with its home ownership, its insurance policies and pension funds. All the things that poverty strips one of; all the safety nets the poor do not have … Poverty is regarded as a blow of fate that just might come. Alternatively, whose fault is it? Perhaps, since the middle class is by and large industrious and ambitious — and has the possibility of advancement in terms of money and status, having a base to start from which the poor have not — the middle class often feels that it is lack of will, initiative and commitment to work as they themselves do, that keeps the poor in that condition.

The basic perception of poverty is the man begging in the street; the conclusion: surely there’s something else he could do? Unemployment is suspect as lack of ability; and well it may be in many developing countries where lack of skills makes people literally unemployable, unable to be active in sectors where employment would be available. But what has to be realised is how that lack comes about in the general disempowerment of poverty itself. To abolish the spectre of the man begging in the street, the woman huddled on her park bench home, the children staring from a refugee camp, is first to make the effort to understand what factors create this disempowerment.

How do victims themselves perceive their poverty?

They live it; know it best, beyond all outside conceptions. What, apart from the survival needs of food and shelter, do they feel they are most deprived of? Researchers moving among them have learned much that is often ignored, such as the perception of women that, as those who with their children suffer most, attention to their advancement through skills and education should take more than a marginal ‘special interest’ place in transformation of the lives of the disadvantaged in general. Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognised by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realisation that a ‘decent life’ cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world’s population exists in poverty.

If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade’s aim.

The violence of nature — flood, drought and earthquake — is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated by humankind on nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.

What are the moral perceptions of poverty?

These are governed by those looking on, looking in, so to speak, from the outside. ‘Poor but honest’: consider the dictum. Why do the rich never make the qualification, ‘Rich but honest’? No one has commented on moral attitudes in this context better than the German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Here is his poem:

Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.

So first make sure that those who now are starving

Get proper helpings when we do the carving.

Is for people to be honest when they are starving our measure of virtue, or is it a measure of our hypocrisy? Common crime, up to a certain level — economic white-collar crime is the prerogative of the wealthy — is a product of poverty and cannot be countered by punitive methods alone. Some of the funds that citizens, living in urban fear of muggings and robberies, want to see used, as the saying goes, to ‘stamp out crime’ with more police and bigger prisons, would have better effect diverted to the aim of stamping out poverty. No one will be safe while punishment and pious moral dicta are handed out in place of food. The campaign against poverty is the best campaign against crime.

Finally, the definition of poverty does not end with material needs; the aim of its eradication will not be completed or perhaps even attainable without the world’s attention to the deprivation of the mind: intellectual poverty. As food is the basic need of the starved body, literacy is the basic need of the starved mind. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Human Development Report’, in the past fifty years adult illiteracy in the world has been reduced to almost half. If it can be virtually ended by early next century, it will be a great force in the six-point global action plan provided by the Report, and not only because the ability to read and write is crucial to participation in development, the open sesame to the world of work, mental skills and self-administration that is economic freedom. To be illiterate or semi-literate is to be deprived of the illumination and pleasure of reading, of one’s rightful share in and exploration of the world of ideas; it is to spend one’s life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.

Illiteracy cruelly stunts the human spirit both as a cause and result of the disempowerment we now dedicate a decade to bring to an end. We are here to celebrate and discuss the means we know we have at our disposal; and I want to close with what I believe can be our text, for the day and the decade. It comes from William Blake. I quote:

Many conversed on these things as they labour’d at the furrow

Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery:

It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal.

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little ones,

And those who are in misery cannot remain so long

If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.’

1997

From a Correspondence with Kenzaburo Oe

Dear Kenzaburo,

Your letter brings the pleasure of realisation that we are simply taking up from where we were interrupted by the end of our encounter in the Tokyo hotel six years ago. There was so much to exchange; it has existed, in the parentheses of separate lives, ready to continue any time. The ambiguity, the connections that criss-cross against chronology between that short meeting and what was going to happen — an invisible prescience which would influence our individual thinking and writing — that turns out to have presaged the links of our then and now. You came to our meeting unknowingly in the foreshadow of the terrible earthquake that was to devastate a Japanese city later that year, and that I was to use, in a novel as yet not conceived, as a metaphor for apocalyptic catastrophe wreaked by nature, alongside that of contemporary devastation by humans upon themselves in Eastern Europe and Africa.

And so now I should not have been surprised that you, writing to me, are preoccupied by the question of violence entering deeply into your awareness, just as it has made its way into mine. This is a ‘recognition’ between two writers; but it goes further. It is the recognition of writers’ inescapable need to read the signs society gives out cryptically and to try to make sense of what these really mean.

I must tell you that when I began to write The House Gun it came to me as the personal tragedy of a mother and father whose son, in a crime of passion, murders their human values along with the man he kills. The parallel theme, placing their lives in the context of their country, the new South Africa, was that they — white people who in the past regime of racial discrimination had always had black people dependent upon them — would find themselves dependent upon a distinguished black lawyer to defend their son. That was going to be the double thesis of my novel. But as I wrote (and isn’t it always the way with us, our exploration of our story lures us further and further into the complexity of specific human existences?) I found that the context of mother, father and son was not existentially determined only geographically and politically; there was the question of the very air they breathed. Violence in the air; didn’t the private act of crime passionel take place within unconscious sinister sanction — the public, social banalisation of violence?

You make the true and terrible observation ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected’. You are rightly most concerned about the situation of children, and I’ll come to that, but first I must comment on the extraordinary, blinkered attitude to violence which I have just recently been subjected to rather than encountered, in Europe and the United States.

Whenever I was interviewed, journalists would propose the question of violence in South Africa as an isolated phenomenon, as if street muggings, burglaries, campus ‘date rapes’, brawls resulting in serious injuries between so-called sports matches were not part of everyday life in their countries.

Let me admit at once that South African cities have at present a high place on the daunting list of those with the worst crime rate in the world. Some South American cities have been prominent on that list so long that this has come to be regarded complacently by the rest of the world as a national characteristic, a kind of folk custom rather than a tragedy. Conversely, South Africa’s violent crime is seen as a phenomenon of freedom — interpreted among racists everywhere (and there are still plenty) as evidence that blacks should have been kept under white hegemony for ever.

The reasons for the rise of crime in South Africa, however, are not those of black people’s abuse of freedom. They are our heritage from apartheid. What the world does not know, or chose not to know, was that during the apartheid regime from 1948, state violence was quotidian and rampant. To be victims of state violence was the way of life for black men, women and children. Violence is nothing new to us; it was simply confined to daily perpetration against blacks. They were shut away outside the cities in their black townships at night, or permanently banished to ethnically defined territory euphemistically known as ‘homelands’, from which only male contract workers were allowed to come to the cities. This was how urban law and order was kept. Violence, and the desperate devaluation of life it called forth, was out of sight. Now that the people of our country are free in their own country to seek work and homes wherever they please, they flock to the cities. But the cities were not built for them; there is no housing for such vast numbers, and their presence on the labour market has swelled the ranks of the unemployed enormously. Their home is the streets; hunger turns them, as it would most of us who deplore crime on full stomachs, to crime, and degradation degenerates into violence. These are the historical facts that make the reasons for violence in South Africa exceptional. Economic development has the chance to change this deal with violence, here, although it is not a total solution, to a significant extent.

As for the matter of guns as domestic possessions along with the house cat — while I was in the USA two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen shot and killed several classmates and their teacher, and while I was in Paris a schoolboy shot and killed his classmate. Why did these children have access to guns? Where did they get them? The American children took the guns from the house of their grandfather; the French child from that of his father. The guns were simply there, in these family homes, commonplace objects, evidently not kept under lock and key, if they had any legitimate place at all in household equipment. I’ve just read American statistics revealing that a gun in the house is forty-three times more likely to kill a member of the household than an intruder. And now you tell me that a Japanese boy killed a companion and hung up the victim’s head in public; a boy fatally stabbed his teacher; an old man was beaten to death by two girls; and a father was killed by his son and the son’s friend.

This brings us to what is the ultimate responsibility of adults in your country, in mine, in the whole world: why could children cold-bloodedly kill? What has made them horrifically indifferent to the pain and death of others, so that they themselves are prepared to inflict these? What has happened to their ‘tender years’?

Setting aside the particular experience of South Africa, I think the woman who challenged you, citing environmental causes — an environment created entirely by the power and will of adults — was correct. If you look back at your own childhood experience, Kenzaburo, and I look back at mine, surely we shall see how our morality, our humanity was distorted by the agenda of adults, something we had to struggle with and shed by our own efforts as we grew: a confirmation of your conviction that there is the ‘power of recovery inherent in children themselves’, yes. You were brainwashed — no less — into believing the immortal worth of the Emperor was such that you must be prepared to kill yourself at his command. I was brainwashed — no less — into believing that my white skin gave me superiority and absolute authority over anyone of another colour.

Children are not subjected to this sort of evil conditioning today. Then what is it, in countries dedicated to peace and democracy, reformed in aversion to the authoritarian cruelties of the past, that makes violence acceptable to children? I know it’s easy to lay responsibility on the most obvious — the visual media, television and electronic games, now also part of home furnishings. But the fact is that these household presences have become the third parent. They raise the child according to a set of values of equal influence to that of the biological parents. The power of the image has become greater than the word; you can tell a child that a bullet in the head kills, a knife in the heart kills. The child sees the ‘dead’ actor appear, swaggering in another role, next day. This devaluation of pain, with its consequent blunting of inhibitions against committing violence, has become, with the acts of glamorous gangsters, mortal-ray-breathing heroes of outer space, the daily, hourly formation of youthful attitudes. It is hauntingly clear to me that these children who kill do not have — it’s like an atrophied faculty — the capacity to relate to pain and destruction experienced by others. I think this is what has happened to the ‘inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents’ you speak of.

What can we do, all of us adults, to take up the responsibility to children, ‘restore their normal selves’, how rouse ‘the power of self-respect inherent in them originally’?

If we place a large share of the blame for their condition upon the media, are we then advocating censorship? The idea is repugnant and frightening to me, who spent decades fighting censorship of information, literature, the arts, in my country. I have in mind something so difficult to bring about that it may seem naive to mention it. Is it not possible that writers, actors, directors and producers of these programmes that make violence acceptably banal could reconsider their values? It is said in what is euphemistically known as the ‘entertainment industry’ — it has also become a brainwashing industry — that the industry simply gives the public what they want. But the public are long conditioned to want what the industry dictates. And why is that public so passive under this self-appointed authority? Is it because the visual media are the true representation of much accepted adult behaviour? The violence in the air has become the exhalation of being?

You know — more telling, even, than any statement in your letter — years ago you made a remarkable implicit claim for the ability of children to restore the power of self-respect inherent in them. The children in your story (in English translation entitled ‘Prize Stock’) are the ones in a remote Japanese village who, by their actions and attitudes, teach the adults that the black American airman who has fallen into their hands during the war is a human being, capable of emotional response and suffering. Taking your premise that the power of self-respect is inherent in children, this means that it also must exist, dormant, in the substance of adult men and women. How can we release this power of restoration in our present era and circumstances?

Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you used these words for an early story: ‘Who will teach us to outgrow our madness?’

Sincerely,

Nadine

1998

Octavio Paz: Poet-Archer

I first met Octavio Paz in the seventies, as a guest in his home in Mexico City. A long lunch, accompanying which was the benison of his rich mind. He was a man with a very large head, could have been a model for an Easter Island monolith, and his high white expanse of forehead held back, in a line straight across its cranial limit, the drama of tight-curled black hair. As you listened to him, that forehead seemed a headlight from which beamed illumination.

Every subject he touched upon was bright and new.

We had sporadic contact after that, and in the last year of his life a correspondence when he and I were trying to arrange for him to visit South Africa under the auspices of the Congress of South African Writers. He was keenly interested in our country, our engagement in transition from oppression to freedom, in particular freedom of the word, and it was only poor health that brought his plans to naught.

As a great contemporary poet, Octavio Paz defined himself more precisely as a Spanish American poet. For language was, to him, not only the instrument of his poetry, the harp of his lyricism — he saw it as the fundamental operative in the fate of human society; a sure barometer of the condition of ideological, political and social situations, and of individual responsibility for these. In one of his classic prose works, ‘The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid’, he wrote: ‘When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meaning.’

Of the question of corruption, he wrote:

Although moralists are scandalised by the fortunes amassed by the revolutionaries [in Mexico], they have failed to observe that this material flowering has a verbal parallel: oratory has become the favourite literary genre of the prosperous … and alongside oratory, with its plastic flowers, there is the barbarous syntax in many of our newspapers, the foolishness of the language on loudspeakers and the radio, and the loathsome vulgarities of advertising — all that asphyxiating rhetoric.

And, as so often with the writings of Octavio Paz, he might have been speaking of and for much of the rest of the world.

Like Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz was one of those superb poets whose brilliance makes nonsense of the notion of lesser minds that taking on the turmoil and conflict in one’s society and its extension in the world, carrying contentious political and social substance up into the sacrosanct ivory tower, corrupts and destroys true creativity.

Octavio Paz risked activism in many ways during Mexico’s recurrent crises. I think of his resignation as his country’s ambassador to India in 1968, when the Mexican government fired upon and killed student protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza.

But the most enduring aspect of his activism — his intellectual activism, if one may make such distinctions in the personality of such a total man — the treasure he bequeaths us along with his poetry, is the ranging ontology of his essays. There, stemming from his philosophy of language, the significance of literature, history, politics and concepts of time interplay in perfect lucidity of discourse on our being. One of my favourite examples of such symbiosis is this one:

Every time the Europeans and their North American descendants have encountered other cultures and civilisations, they have called them backward. This is not the first time a race or a civilisation has imposed its forms on others, but it is certainly the first time one has set up as a universal ideal, not a changeless principle, but change itself. The Muslim or Christian based the alien’s inferiority on a difference of faith: for the Greeks or Toltecs, he was inferior because he was a barbarian, a Chichemecan. Since the eighteenth century, Africans or Asiatics have been inferior because they were not modern. The Western world has identified itself with change and time, and there is no modernity other than that of the West … the new Heathen Dogs can be counted in the millions … they are called ‘underdeveloped peoples’.

‘Underdeveloped’ — this adjective belongs to the anemic and castrated language of the United Nations. The word has no precise meaning in the fields of anthropology and history. It is not a scientific but a bureaucratic term … Its vagueness masks two pseudo-ideas: the first takes for granted that only one civilisation exists, or that different civilisations may be reduced to a single model — modern Western civilisation; the second affirms that changes of societies and cultures … are linear and progressive and that they can be measured.

Yet Octavio Paz was not a pessimist.

The beauty of imagery in his poetry, the elegant joy with which he handles the language whose power he reveres, and which triumphantly survives even translation — these are an affirmative love of life. I quote from one of his poems:

To see, to touch each day’s lovely forms

The light throbs, all arrows and wings.

The wine-stain on the tablecloth smells of blood.

As the coral thrusts branches in the water

I stretch my sense to this living hour;

the moment fulfills itself in a yellow harmony.

Midday, ear of wheat heavy with minutes, eternity’s brimming cup.

This sensibility coexisted in Octavio Paz along with rebellious anger against a succession of corrupt and/or incompetent governments. I quote from another poem:

We have dug up Rage

… The lovers’ park is a dungheap

The library is a nest of killer rats

The university is a muck full of frogs

The Altar is Chanfalla’s swindle

The brains are stained with ink

The doctors dispute in a den of thieves

The businessmen

Fast hands slow thoughts

officiate in the graveyard.

Out of every experience, remote as it might seem to be from inspiration for poetry or imaginative prose, he brought sensuous and intellectual creativity. Out of his formal stint in India came, later, in 1995, a remarkable collection of essays moving, from personal celebration of his days there, through an exploration of India’s art, literature, music and religions, to a comparison of Islamic, Hindu and Western civilisations in the course of world history.

He writes: ‘India did not enter me through my mind but through my senses.’

And yet he quotes an anonymous Indian poet who says:

Admire the art of the archer

he never touches the body and breaks the heart

The collection of essays in this late work is entitled In Light of India. In light of everything Octavio Paz wrote, all of us who read him receive his light.

And his was the art of the poet-archer, that goes straight to the heart and mind, where the centre of being is one.

1999

When Art Meets Politics

Itake it that we are excluding propaganda from our consideration of where and why art meets politics. Propaganda, in word and image, has its necessary justification in conditioning people to go to war, buy things, vote for political parties, but has nothing to do with originality, since it comes from the certainty of orthodoxies; is never a quest, an individual exploration.

Of course, the arts are many, and their expression of social issues springs to mind from Picasso’s Guernica via Goya as the apotheosis of wars, to — in film — Costa-Gavras’s and Semprun’s Z of the Greek colonels as the apotheosis of junta oppression, Schlöndorff’s Tin Drum as that of the social deformations, the dwarfing of humanity during Nazism, to Kusturica’s Underground and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game as that of conflict which continues above ground, even today, and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing vision of racism in America.

As a writer, however, I naturally concentrate on our subject in relation to the art I myself practise and know best in the work of my fellow writers, dead and alive — literature.

First a look back at works in which most obviously art meets politics, on different levels and in differing ways. One should begin with the Bible, of course, both Old Testament and New; the lyrical source-books of politics secular — the politics of tribal succession — and politics religious — the power struggles for the soul, between human beings and God. Then I pass over the centuries, the ancient Greeks and Dante, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cry, The Beloved Country. These last two show how a sentimental story can be an effective form of expression of a social issue, since, a century apart, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Alan Paton’s Reverend Kumalo brought the issues of slavery and racism into the consciousness of millions of readers who might not have admitted these if presented any other way.

Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin despised sentiment as inadequate to express the realities of race prejudice, revealing the black persona as the one of whom Nobody Knows My Name, the ‘Invisible Man’ rejected by whites.

Joseph Roth used the picaresque mode to epitomise patriotic hubris and the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the von Trotta generations in The Radetzky March.

Malraux gave expression to the mood of Days of Hope in the doomed early resistance to fascism in the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway proposed the sexual stimulus of war as a social phenomenon — the earth moved by orgasm rather than by bombs.

Thomas Mann used the snowy isolation of the very place we find ourselves in today — Davos — to signify the complacency of a Europe skiing towards disaster, from which to pitch his anti-hero, Hans Castorp, into the ‘universal feast of Death’ which Mann saw as the 1914 war.

Milan Kundera took his art from a Communist regime that turned the writer into window-washer, away to the labyrinth of exile, returning always upon itself in the sense that Life Is Elsewhere, and Ariel Dorfman, also from exile, writing Death and the Maiden, revealed the social situation of a woman in the reconciliation of an emerging democracy, confronted with her former torturer as house-guest. I myself sought understanding for self and others through writing of the predetermination of a father’s political faith on the life of the next generation, in my novel Burger’s Daughter, and lately, with The House Gun explored the social significance of a crime passionnel in the world climate of urban violence we live in now. Jorge Semprun is one who has interiorised the social and ideological conflicts of our time as autobiography in the valediction Adieu, vive clarté.

Why have these writers, and many others, taken on themselves the meeting of art with socio-politics?

We are fatally linked to the political and social consequences of whatever our society, our country, that country’s politics, may be, and further, to the flux and reflux of the globalisation we are beginning to live through. That is why original expression is inexorably linked to politics. It is, as Kafka wrote, ‘a leap out of murderers’ row, it is a seeing of what is really taking place’.⁸⁴

The next question is what is the effect of the writer’s original expression of social issues on the individual consciousness of society? I am told that one of the criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature, apart from the quality of the means of expression, is that the works of the writer should be of ‘benefit to mankind’. The way in which art’s original expression of social and political issues is of benefit to mankind lies surely in the engagement of the artist with these issues at his or her deepest level of independent, searching understanding, the ability of the creative imagination to mine for the unexpressed in human motivation, the unadmitted, the necessary insights that the facts can never reveal.

Now this is not to deny that writers themselves have been and are hotly divided on whether or not art should be involved with an imperative of political and social issues. Proust judged that such issues as ‘whether the Dreyfus affair or the war’ simply ‘furnished excuses to the writers for not deciphering … that book within them’.⁸⁵ The Marxist critic, Ernst Fischer, cuttingly pronounced, ‘The feature common to all significant artists and writers in the capitalist world is their inability to come to terms with the social reality that surrounds them.’⁸⁶ Picasso — never at a loss for words: ‘What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet … Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it … painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.’⁸⁷ While Flaubert complains: ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it … it’s not a question of politics but of the mental state of France.’⁸⁸

George Steiner, speaking of writing under totalitarian rule, calls for the writer to stop writing ‘a few miles down the road from the death camp … when the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem’.⁸⁹ But hear Neruda: ‘Can poetry serve our fellow men? Can it find a place in man’s struggles? … I felt a pressing need to write a central poem that would bring together the historical events, the geographical situations, the life … of our peoples.’⁹⁰ And Rilke, looking at a Cézanne painting, exclaims: ‘Suddenly one has the right eyes’,⁹¹ and Kundera sees writers and artists as vital witnesses of the twentieth century as an age marked by tyranny, saying: ‘People regard those days as an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books and legalised murder. But we who remember must bear witness; it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.’⁹²

Finally, for us — writers and artists bringing original expression to politics and social issues at the end of this century where neither socialism nor capitalism has achieved justice and human fulfilment for all — Czeslaw Milosz has the rubric:

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic

In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.⁹³

1999

A Letter to Future Generations

Dear citizens of the twenty-first century,

There is no escaping the past, and so one must take an honest look at your inheritance from the twentieth century. There are many aspects; I choose that of the new, never-before concepts that arose during my life as a child of the time. One that is of great significance to your lives as you take over is the concept of globalisation.

The feasibility of globalisation has been made possible by the huge technological advances of the twentieth century, particularly in means of communication, from the satellite up among the stars to the computer on every office table. Information may be exchanged across the world in real time; distance means nothing so long as jet aircraft have the fuel to overcome it. Globalisation has all the means of efficiency to regulate itself as it is conceived so far: primarily as a one-world of investment, a super-tool of international finance.

Has it a human face?

The real necessity for globalisation — which you will have to tackle — is nothing less than the question of whether the gap between rich and poor countries can be narrowed by it. What role can globalisation play in eradicating world poverty? For poverty puts an inhuman, outcast mask on more than three billion of our world’s population.

If globalisation is to have a human face in your century its premise is that development is about people in interaction on the planet we have occupied, so far, without sharing.

This will not be achieved, however, through worldwide shopping by internet. In the twentieth century consumption has grown unprecedentedly, reaching around $24 trillion in 1998, but the spending and devouring spree, far from widely benefiting the poor, in some aspects undermined the truly human prospects for globalisation: sustainable development for all.

Runaway consumption by the developed world has eroded renewable resources such as fossil fuels, forests and fishing grounds, polluted local and global environments, and pandered to promotion of needs for conspicuous display in place of the legitimate needs of life.

While those of us who have been the generations of big consumers need to consume less, for more than one billion of the world’s poorest people increased consumption is a matter of life and death and a basic right — the right to freedom from want. And this is not want of food and clean water alone; there are other forms of want — illiteracy, lack of technological skills: the basic qualifications for benefiting from the concept of globalisation. Illiteracy is the basis of global cultural deprivation, and it exists among great numbers of the world’s population. From it comes isolation from many of the forms of culture that are essential to the human right to develop individual potential for a full life. There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries.

Then there is the matter of translation of the world’s munificent store of literary enlightenment. With all the ease of technological reproduction of the written word now attained there remains the fact that the human process of translating creative literature from one language to another — which certainly, so far, cannot be achieved by any electronic brain — is not recognised as a highly important means of bringing about the ideal of global understanding; which surely must be the underlying philosophy of globalisation?

In the new millennium there will be the need to remedy this by establishing schools of translation in universities (they are rare in the twentieth century); by the action of publishers to cooperate in joint enterprise across language boundaries; for government ministries of arts and culture to provide subsidies for this work; and for the ministries of foreign affairs to wake up and realise that this is an initiative of diplomacy effective beyond the conventional cultural limits of providing cultural exchange mainly in the form of scholarships abroad.

Consumption is necessary for human development when, as cultural consumption does, it enlarges the capabilities of and improves people’s lives without adversely affecting the lives of others. And a brake on material consumption need not, as some fear, bring about closed industries and shops if the power of becoming consumers is extended among the population of the globe.

Whose responsibility will it be to bring these things about?

That of many, international and national.

It is the responsibility of the European Community, which flouts the principles of globalisation through its blatant protectionism. It is the responsibility of national governments to bring about just consumerism. Theirs is a legal one: the framing of laws in each country for justice in the access to and share of its resources. And it is the responsibility of international law, an aspect of globalisation long contested in respect of fishing rights, for example, and towards the end of the twentieth century, at last, in the essential process of establishing an international criminal court. For globalisation, we must admit, posits the most difficult secular morality possible: a moral authority above all those individual ones of the global concept’s component countries.

Non-governmental and civic organisations have the responsibility both in building human capability and in ensuring that a development philosophy prevails that projects are not imposed upon people according to others’ ideas of their needs, but are planned and brought into being only with the beneficiaries themselves, according to their knowledge of their community and environment. Let the remnants of the age of social engineering be deeply buried in the twentieth century, not with a backward glance, but a shudder.

Now if we are realistic we have to see that on the doorstep of the new century there is delivered a new threat to globalisation with a human face. Thirty-five per cent of our world is in recession as the old century ends. Many countries are in strife. This means more millions of refugees, driven homeless and starving to swell the count of the globe’s three billion poor, calculated before the tragedies of Kosovo and Angola, to name only two. In Russia the winter of 1988–9 froze over impoverished people in their disillusion with international openness in trade and investment; these elements of globalisation as it has been evidenced so far have not shown them a human face.

But we know what you absolutely must not do is allow the shadow of a world economic recession that fell upon the last decade of the twentieth century, reaching from Asia over West, North and South, to become an excuse to postpone the inescapable responsibility of the developed world, in the new millennium, to pursue the eradication, rather than the traditional band-aid amelioration, of poverty which exists alongside the globalisation of economic power.

Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls — when it sounds in one stock exchange its note reverberates throughout the world, shaking the Haves as well as casting down even further the Have-nots.

Global free markets mean nothing in the end, if there is no one able to come to buy. The hazard of decline through the very interdependence created by globalisation of world economies: this negative impact upon the progressive and positive in the concept is what surely must cause even the most complacent acceptors of the time-disgraced division of the world’s resources between rich and poor, to realise that the billions of fellow men and women in abject poverty are in coexistence with them, not safely quarantined in isolation. The financier George Soros has come to the reflection: ‘There are collective interests that don’t find expression in market values’.⁹⁴

And perhaps those five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia, the USA — who among others enrich their national economies by selling arms for the globe’s conflicts and wars, will hear when Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, says of production of arms, ‘Human benefits that flow by redirecting these forces can be remarkably large’,⁹⁵ and when Kofi Annan says, ‘No development without peace; no peace without development’.⁹⁶

No globalisation without a human face.

The twenty-first century will achieve a new and radiant definition of progress if you can work to put that face upon your world.

1999

Five Years into Freedom: My New South African Identity

When I was young, in South Africa during the Second World War, I was far removed from the bombs, the nights in underground shelters, the rationed food, in Europe. I read reflections by those living through this experience, and these were not what I had in my mind as the way life must be, there; I had constructed their lives out of a projection of my own priorities in what makes life, my own fears of what would be most threatened in imagined circumstances.

Our war — South Africa’s liberation struggle — is over. On 2 June, we shall cast our votes in our second post-apartheid elections. We have been led to that day by one of the great men of this century. He now displays the ultimate wisdom in closing his era at his peak of accomplishments, the final one being the assurance that his successor is the one equal to the era about to begin. We have lived five years of freedom. Whatever the frustrations as well as triumphs we’ve tackled, it is an achievement placed toweringly beside the years of apartheid racism and before them the years of colonial racism — five years against three centuries. Yet I see that this period is often the object of the same kind of subjective projection I imposed on the reality of wartime Europe fifty years ago.

Again and again, when I am interviewed or find myself in encounters with other people abroad, the burning question is, ‘What is happening to whites?’

And again and again, my genuinely surprised response is: ‘What about blacks? Don’t you believe there are challenges to be met in their new lives?’

There are two obvious assumptions to be made of this approach to South Africa by Europeans and North Americans. The majority of them being white, they identify only with whites, whether consciously or subconsciously. Because I am white, they assume I do the same. It’s the Old Boys/Old Girls Club producing its dog-eared membership card. The projection is of the priorities of their lives, along with the old colonial conditioning that these belong with whiteness and are incontrovertibly, always, for ever, threatened by the Otherness — blackness.

Five years into freedom. What kind of fossil should I be, unearthed from the cave of bones that was apartheid, if my essential sense of self were to be as a white?

There are some who still have this sense — suffer it, I would say, and unnecessarily, so it becomes a form of self-flagellation. I don’t posit this in any assertion of smug superiority; I should just wish to prod them into freedom from confinement. And there is also the other — unadmitted — side of feeling superior as white: being ashamed of being white. An over-compensation for the past, useless for living fully in the present.

If you put the question to me, I hear it as, ‘What about us?’ — South Africans going as best we can about the business of living together. Being white as a state determining my existence is simply not operative. I was privileged through racism, I rejected and actively opposed racism, I played my small part in the liberation struggle and I know that as a result I am a South African and nobody else, living in a country we are in the difficult, thrilling process of creating. That we must create; for despite its natural resources, its sophisticated infrastructure, its advanced technology, what we want never existed for us before: a truly human society.

Grand words. How does it feel to live day to day under their imperative? Five years into freedom: for me, the great change comes from others, from the change in atmosphere in the cities, the streets. It is nothing new for me to ‘mix’ with people of all colours; my closest friendships and working relationships have been in this context for many years. But the old life existed counter to everything that defined and characterised the country. It was — even if triumphantly always in opposition — surrounded by the laws, the state, secular and religious traditions that represented everything it was not. Although we said ‘our country’, this was in reference to that which people were suffering, striving, surviving to bring about — there was no identity with the official entity called South Africa. We had no country.

I am aware now, every day, in so many ways, big and small, happy and troubling, that I can speak of ‘our country’. If the air of taking possession can be palpable, I feel it when I walk out of my gate. I hear it in the volume of traffic. I know it when I pick my way between vendors of everything from mobile phones and fake French perfume to tomatoes and toilet rolls on the pavements. I see it out of the corner of my eye when I stand in a queue at my local post office and eavesdrop on the black postmaster giving instruction to the young Afrikaans employee at the counter. I hear it in the accents of our many languages, listeners speaking English on radio phone-in programmes. It is that indefinable quality called confidence; even the member of the vast number of unemployed who guides me theatrically into a parking bay has it — yes, a contradiction of his actual circumstances.

Well, I live in Johannesburg. A city in transition is full of such contradictions.

Recently my bag was snatched from the car when the friend driving stopped at a traffic light; I had forgotten to lock the passenger-seat door — our routine precaution, like the free distribution of condoms against Aids. I was indignant. House keys, credit card, ATM card — the fact that they were filched by someone living on the streets who had no middle-class status to own such things did not assuage me. But on the same streets in the press of people flowing and dodging round one another, the great mass who had been shut out of the city in ghettos and ‘ethnic homelands’, if someone jostles me, I hear, ‘Sorry, maGogo’ (‘I apologise, Grandmother’). Ordinary good manners, you will say. No. He apologises. He accepts me as a common relative in the human family; after he and his forebears have been decreed outcast from it for generations, both subtly and brutally, colonialist patronage to apartheid rejection. The benison of human feeling at once shines out against, and is threatened by, violent crime. The second question fired by individuals from abroad is one with a target that can’t be missed. Back to the first proposition of the contradiction: the snatched bag. ‘What about crime?’ I shall not duck. The impersonal statistics are there, never mind my credit card. The city I live in is among those with the highest crime rates in the world. That my French granddaughter, a student in Nice, has had her little old car stolen is an incident of urban crime all over the world, but it doesn’t add up to the indicting total in one city, one country, the way the loss of my bag will in the calculation of those passing judgement on the progress of a country with a five-year commitment to democracy as against the several hundred years’ experience of its evolution in the West.

The curious view from abroad is that only whites are threatened by, and concerned about, street crime, hijackings and housebreaking and the violence these involve. Again and again, there are descriptions of suburban razor wire and Rottweilers as the prevailing flora and fauna of the white suburbs. The facts are that homes, humble as well as substantial and even complete with swimming pool, in what are still the black townships of greater Johannesburg, are also armed with wire and dogs. Black professional and businessmen and women who now take a place among the affluent owners of fine cars (regarded primly as suspect conspicuous consumers by observers who do not have the same moral judgement of whites driving the same models) are also victims of hijacking. We face the problems together.

But if you move about in my city, you don’t need a criminologist to identify the reason for crime’s prevalence. And it is not a bleeding-heart apologist response when the blunt answer is: unemployment.

I have taught myself to drive, all over again, fifty or so years after I was first licensed, because there has to be a new, nippy know-how and understanding of an unwritten code among drivers to weave among the buffalo herd of the road, the minibuses. We call them ‘combis’ because they are combination buses and taxis and conduct themselves as a hybrid, which is confusing to the uninitiated driver of a car. They hoot continuously, to attract the attention of potential passengers; they stop anywhere at the signal of a raised finger from the kerbside, the way a hailed taxi responds; they have regular routes they follow like a bus but no obligation to restrict themselves to any designated bus stops. They are always packed to suffocation limit: they have solved the transport question, which a succession of white regimes dealt with as the decision that blacks use their legs. To me, the combis are symbols of the immeasurable influx of people to the city since freedom was confirmed at the ballot box in 1994, the trek of many thousands who come to find work, and for whom there will be little or no possibility of finding it. When the humiliation of begging fails, desperation offers one way to survive — crime.

This phenomenon of crime is not, as some observers take smug satisfaction in regarding it, the phenomenon of freedom.

Things were not better in the old days of the apartheid regime: they were kept out of sight. The unemployed and underemployed who come to the city hungry in every way for a better life now were corralled in that extraordinary experiment in social engineering, poverty-ridden ‘ethnic homelands’. The social disease, unemployment, was quarantined; migratory labour from the rural areas, and from one province to another, was permitted to enter the city only in numbers determined healthy by the needs of industry. And these workers were legally forbidden to take their families with them. I have to remind myself of this when I see among us that sad developing-world category of childhood, street children; now they are there before our eyes instead of underfed and undereducated in the ‘homelands’ of apartheid.

It is not a politically correct convenience to blame the past, apartheid, for unemployment. The plain fact is that dammed-up unemployment has burst upon us from the inhuman confines of the past; it is not something inherent in freedom, a kind of punishment for our people’s audacity in defeating whites-only rule. As a result of the policies of the past, black people come to the city doubly disadvantaged. First, industrial development, hampered through sanctions that were necessary to end apartheid, has only limited employment to provide in a period when, despite every effort towards expansion, such development is affected by quaking conditions in world finance. Second, the majority of the unemployed do not have the education or skills to take on such jobs as are available. Many are illiterate or semi-literate, the products of the contemptible level of education apartheid decreed for blacks. Few have any of the basic skills demanded by an increasingly technological labour market.

I cannot shrug and dismiss them as a lost generation. I am one who will press for innovative large-scale government projects that will institute skills training and employment at the same time. When the adults are providers, the children will not be on the streets. And I am encouraged by the government’s chivying of business to give training in financial processes, and the condition laid down to foreign investors that there must be a training component in their most welcome decisions to profit from investment opportunities here.

There is enthusiasm among Haves in the city to see a solution to the unemployment of Have-nots in what they call, broadly, small business, and there are formations that commendably provide modest finance for this. Yet when I pass, near a supermarket, a young man mending shoes in a booth he has been supplied with, I can’t help thinking this is something of a dead end for him: couldn’t he be learning to be an electrician or plumber, even if he cannot become one of the millennium’s computer-literate? His ‘small business’ venture doesn’t seem to have the vigour of self-initiated brisk trading by those pavement vendors whom I note, month by month, acquiring the acumen of what will arrest the gaze of customers beyond a mere pile of bananas — the latest sports-club logo on a cap, the look-alike Nikes. South African blacks are new to shopkeeping, having been barred from owning shops in the city. They don’t have the capital to do so, yet, but you can see they’re learning fast — the hard way.

In awareness of sharing as a post-apartheid ethos, at what levels is this evident? At the top economic level, which used to be exclusively that occupied by whites, like begins to live beside like. It was a pejorative — aimed at white privilege in general — to refer to ‘Houghton’, but now our President Mandela lives in that residential area, more modestly than he would if he made the conventional choice of the official residence occupied by the white regimes’ presidents in Pretoria. Sandton — the most luxurious of garden suburbs — can’t really be regarded as the generic symbol of white capitalist living any longer, because black dignitaries in professions, business, communications and the arts now also favour the landscaped town house complexes complete with security service. They are a minority among blacks, of course. At the broadest, basic level of the new social pyramid there are changes that are not less contrasting, in their way, with the living conditions of the past. Late last year, I was in the city’s old black township of Alexandra, in the brand-new three-room house, built with government subsidy and a low-interest bank loan, into which the Mashabela family of five had just moved after seventeen years in a one-room shack housing fourteen people. This kind of levelling of material conditions is my primary criterion of justice in my country, the city I live in.

I know it could not possibly be brought about in five years, or ever can be completely achieved, on the evidence of the chasms between the life of rich and poor in developed capitalist countries that have declared themselves dedicated to it for several hundred years, and the failure of socialist countries (of socialism — so far in human history, but not for ever, in my belief) to avoid making freedom a prisoner of its own dictates. South Africa — like its combis — has had to choose pragmatically to be a hybrid: a mixed economy, with every bias it can afford towards making the legal equality, now achieved, meaningful in economic, material form for the impoverished majority.

It follows that community of purpose is particularly decisive for us, coming as we do, rawly, from our divided, racist past. My own natural preoccupations, within my life as I see it as a responsible citizen, have always been in the arts, what are called (rather embarrassingly for my taste) cultural formations, in which race or colour or even language differences were an irrelevance in common enthusiasms, the realm of the imagination that couldn’t be annexed, even by apartheid. But now, as it should be, in pursuit of South Africa as an African country rather than an Africanised outpost of the West, the initiatives and much of the innovation in culture are taken up by blacks — a form of unofficial, organic affirmative action that creates a balance that was missing while partnerships between black and white were always weighted by the fact that whites, by law, in the ordinary pursuits of daily life, had access to opportunities blacks did not have. I feel at home — in the real sense of the concept — as never before, even in working with my long-time close friend Mongane Wally Serote, poet, former freedom fighter, now a member of parliament with a high position in the Department of Arts and Culture, and with Walter Chakela, director of the Windybrow Centre for the Arts, in a total context that didn’t exist for them and for me before.

Perhaps that may be regarded as a rather special area of race relations, far from ‘Sorry, maGogo’ in the street. In between, I reflect on my feelings when, moving about the city and suburbs, I pass a school at the hour when classes end. It was a whites-only school I knew well. I see the kids coming out, the small boys scuffling with one another, the little girls tangling hands and giggling together. They are all shades of colour — South African black, South African Indian, South African mélange, South African white. They are growing up with a common initiating experience, into life. They will never be subject to the unspeakable horrors that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has exposed to us, and that have been so vital for us to face, what we did or what we allowed to happen. These children are not being kept apart to learn to hate, to fear the unknown, the untouched in one another.

One of the generation that was the victim of the horrors of apartheid, Tokyo Sexwale, lately Premier of Gauteng, of which Johannesburg is the capital, and now a black-empowerment crusader married to a white woman, said something this month that could be our rubric to live by: ‘If blacks get hurt, I get hurt. If whites get hurt, that’s my wife, and if you harm coloured people, you’re looking for my children. Your unity embodies who I am.’

1999

Hemingway’s Expatriates: A Way of Looking at the World

There is surely no writer in the English-speaking world, born in the generations after Ernest Hemingway, who does not share this centennial celebration through having been influenced in some way by his work. I am of the first generation after his. On another continent, I grew up against a similar small-town background. The Middle West, USA, and a gold-mining town in South Africa shared something beyond their backwoods limitations: mine shallowly occupied by whites as opposed to indigenous Africans, his shallowly occupied by whites as opposed to indigenous American Indians, although in his environment the Indians were perhaps a ghostly rather than a material presence, and in mine the Africans were very much alive, a majority left out in colonialism’s double book-keeping of who counted.

Both twentieth-century environments were at ‘the ragged edge of a newly formed and still forming cultural universe’;⁹⁷ from there, he and I went different ways, I to enter through moving deeper into the reality of my own country, he through seeking reality in the moveable feast of the world outside.

But in the craft with which I provisioned myself as a writer there were certain skills I learned from him and am grateful for, along with the invaluable workshop handed on by Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence and Eudora Welty. I am speaking of the writing of short stories specifically, and I am not referring, as every writer knows, to the amateur’s process of imitation. What a beginning writer learns from a master (of either sex) is the range of the imagination working upon life — what literature can go after, what is missed by those who do not have what Chinua Achebe has noted as the invisible ring around the eye that marks the writer.

From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen, within myself, when writing, for what went unsaid by my characters; what can be, must be conveyed in other ways, and not alone by body-language but also in the breathing spaces of syntax: the necessity to create silences which the reader can interpret from these signs. Hermeneutics doesn’t belong in the locked cupboards of academic circles: it’s part of the illumination and pleasure of the reader, and Hemingway knew superbly how to bring it about. There is also, I believe, a misperception about his dialogue — it is not realistic but aphoristic, and there Beckett and Pinter are ones who came after and are a presence at the centennial.

Something else I learned to consider — judiciously — for myself, from Hemingway, was the use of repetition: we need to coin another term to honour him, conveying repetition transformed in his hand as a special term for emphasis; used well, repetition becomes the Beethoven note, a knell laden with resonant meaning. Of course, like most of us fallible writers, even Hemingway, who used it with perfect timing, overdid it sometimes, parodying one of his own strengths.

Then there is the power of the deliberate non sequitur. ‘And we went up into the town to the Plaza and those were the last people who were shot in the village.’ This is a quote from a novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but I would say it was learned from the way of telling Hemingway taught himself with the stories (I avoid the word ‘technique’ because writing is organic, it cannot be learned as a technique.)

A short story succeeds, if it does, as a series or play of echoes. Its marvellously rigorous discipline does not allow for explanation, whether authorial or disguised through a protagonist. Beginning with the conjunction, the echoes in this non-sequitur sentence of Hemingway’s text sound back and forth through everything that has happened in the novel: the blessed banal continuity — and the horror of it — that life goes on with violence as something that can be measured in acceptance — they were the sum of it, the ‘last people’ to be shot — along with the daily round, up at the Plaza. The devastating reflection of how people are, what circumstances make of them, what they consent to become: all this is there. Tight-lipped? On the contrary, an oracle sounding back and forth.

In the novels, Hemingway indulged luxuriantly in the soliloquy, particularly in For Whom The Bell Tolls, recycled from the authorial interventions of nineteenth-century novelists. To overhear what is going on in the head of Robert Jordan as a subtext to what we are experiencing with him, through him — and he is a character who buttonholes you like the Ancient Mariner and you don’t want to break free — is no contrivance. But the many pages of Pilar recounting, with dialogue formal between quotes, etc., the flailing of the fascists in a village, is a contrived set-piece from which a young aspiring writer such as I was would do best not to learn. Hemingway does it dazzlingly; but it is Hemingway, not Pilar, speaking. And he knows it; he gets round it by having Robert Jordan reflect: ‘If that woman could only write … He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it.’ Hemingway tried, and didn’t, because Pilar couldn’t possibly have remembered and reconstructed the experience in the imaginatively ordered way he allowed himself to present it.

That Hemingway, indeed, didn’t let Pilar tell it in her own idiom — the one he created for her throughout the rest of the novel — is an aside pertinent to a general question. At one time in the volatile attention of socio-literary criticism there was much discussion about Ernest Hemingway’s decisions in writing direct speech as translation from another language. We are not talking of the task of an interpreter sitting up in a box at a conference. We are talking of the liberties a writer may or may not take in inventing — no less — a language that is neither the original nor an English equivalent, since this last is impossible. The intention is to convey the mode of expression, the musical beat, the harmony and dissonance, the states of mind that are the integument of the language’s ancient formation.

The first consideration must be how well does the writer know the original language? And my premise must be that Hemingway the linguist knew Spanish very well. It was the tongue of one of his two love affairs with the world outside his own — the other love affair I shall come to later.

So the use of idiomatic expressions, which he often manages the best way, by giving them in the original, in contexts from which their meaning soon becomes clear, cannot be faulted. But for the flow of the speaker, all must be Hemingway’s own invention, based on his ear for the original, but surely influenced selectively by what he finds most attractive, subtle, coarse, not only in the language but his outsider’s version of the mind and spirit behind it.

A piece of theatre. When he sets himself to convey this in English, he must make casting decisions, subconsciously and subjectively: whether it is a peasant, a fascist or a bull-fighter, speaking Spanish. What one could learn from him, here, was caution: to be less sure than he of the possibility of bringing off this doubly creative act: to accept its very real limitations. Much as I have admired what to me is his masterpiece in the genre of the novel, I am always aware that the virtuoso performance I am responding to so strongly is that of Ernest Hemingway in the hired peasant outfit of Pilar or Anselmo. If the liberty he has taken can have been part of his influence on literature in English, there are doubts about its legitimacy that have not yet been solved …

‘He made the English language new. He changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would write and speak … a certain way of looking at the world.’⁹⁸

This is Joan Didion’s claim, in a recent outstanding essay on Hemingway. I agree that he was one of those, in the English-speaking and writing world, who opened new spaces for the way it was possible to write — as for speaking, I should think that would apply only to his fellow Americans.

It was James Joyce who made the English language new, with contributions coming from Ernest Hemingway and, some would say, Virginia Woolf.

As for changing the way of looking at the world — I think we in the English-speaking and — writing countries need to ask ourselves what was happening in this way in other cultures, other uses of language and literature. Another anglophone writer and critic, V.S. Pritchett, no less, wrote of Hemingway: ‘He has defined for us the personality of our own time.’⁹⁹

Whose time? Where?

The way Hemingway may have defined ‘the personality of our time’, ‘changed the way of looking at the world’ cannot be claimed as that of the world: the world of the Japanese, the Russians, the people of India, the people of Islam … you name the global list. Let’s keep a sense of proportion in our cultural and linguistic places in the world, whichever these may be. Ernest Hemingway himself surely would have recognised the perspectives opened up by the newly ground lenses of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Yukio Mishima, and a handspan of poets from Apollinaire to Rainer Maria Rilke. His expatriate personality would imply a certain roving itinerary of reading.

What do I mean by an expatriate personality?

It becomes necessary to explore this in the tension between living and writing from which Ernest Hemingway’s work, like that of all of us, comes. And to do this I must go back to the similarity of early backgrounds between the Middle West of the USA, and the gold-mining town on the veld in South Africa. In both, Europe was the Mecca of culture for whites; in order to live the painter’s life, the writer’s life, the far-flung devotee yearned to go and become, there; kiss the Black Rock, receive the white ring around the eye. Hemingway wrote his Nick stories, his early truth in beauty wonderfully achieved, and received some recognition. But it was Europe that beckoned, Europe that counted; I don’t believe of him, as I don’t believe of us in South Africa, that it was so much the desire to broaden our experience as it was the idea to be recognised as a writer where to be a writer, an artist, was the highest calling, far above any of the commercial or professional activities recognised in what were, not long before, frontier towns. In the Nick stories, life vibrates; but for the writer — to borrow from Milan Kundera in a very different context — life was elsewhere.

Hemingway pursued it, and never really came home again, did he?

The difference between him and the other most illustrious expatriates, Joyce, Mann, Brecht, and later followers such as Kundera, Achebe, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, is that they became expatriate through political persecution or revulsion against the particular regimes in their countries, and Hemingway had no motivation of either. What he did have, or rather developed, was the beginnings of a broader human consciousness beyond nationalistic operatives, good or bad: and he made his choice of one of the causes of justice that was threatened in the cultural Mecca of Europe.

Why and how?

I am not concerned with what Ernest Hemingway did or did not do, in his own body, his own person, out of his own courage, in the Spanish Civil War. What I follow with fascination in his work, in this geographical area of its scope as in others, is the fictional expatriate persona he so profoundly created there. Warner Berthoff says of Hemingway in his later writing life ‘he began making books out of activities and places he had elected for the sake of the pleasure he anticipated from them — Africa and the Caribbean, fishing and big game hunting’ and remarks that in these books there is a ‘palpable loss of control’.¹⁰⁰ This is one aspect of the exposition of the persona — in decline, so to speak. But in the periods when there was full-throttle control, enormous writing skill, the expatriate protagonist Hemingway creates has become one for different reasons.

I have cited a concern for human justice, to which Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls (a cult book for my generation, published when I was nineteen) takes up a cause at great risk of hardship and loss of his life. And yet Jordan, it becomes clear as one reads, is fighting this war for personal emotional reasons rather than a dedication to justice as the ethical base of humanity itself. Jordan fights in this war because of his exogamous love affair with the Spanish people; because Spanish people believe in the Republic as something worth dying for. There is an apologist tone when he comes — it always seems embarrassedly — to define ideological motivations. I quote: ‘He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war [my italics], they were the only party whose programme and discipline he could respect. What were his politics then? He had none, now, he told himself.’

And he doesn’t reveal what these were, before.

Whenever he confronts revolutionary concepts, he does so in literary terms, thinks of them merely as clichés, not statements that, however banal-sounding, stand for convictions held. A kind of conservative individualism (there is another kind!) collides in self-satisfaction with the claims of the wider concern for humanity, however flawed that credo might be. I quote Jordan: ‘When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognised your own personal fallibility of that mutable substitute for the apostles’ creed, the party line.’

The expatriate fights for a cause — in this case the Left — while retaining the unexamined values, the buried fears of ideological choices within him — he has no politics, he tells himself: neither the Communist one he serves under nor the Democratic one, accepted like church on Sunday, that he has turned his back on, at home.

‘I would rather have been born here.’

Away; away from all the Midwests, urban or rural, of the world, which stand for what there is to be faced at home.

‘I would rather have been born here.’

Thus Robert Jordan, in Spain, formulates perfectly the credo of the self-elected expatriate. It is also the credo of those others, men and women, who are created within that second love affair of Ernest Hemingway — both of which being the only kind I think it my business to be interested in — the love affair with Africa.

Ernest Hemingway was in love with Africa. And as with others in such a state of emotion, in love with a woman or a man, he constructed for himself according to his own needs and desires something that had little relation to the reality of its object. I hope I won’t offend with heresy when I say that Hemingway never had both feet down on Africa. Never really was in Africa. For a country is its people; Africa is its people. Never really was there, if we are to read the novels and stories for which he chose Africa as one of those panoramic three-dimensional postcards where at first light the animals seem to leap out of the thorn bush. I am interested in how this illuminates the expatriate persona, in fiction as a way of looking at the world — something beyond an individual writer’s life and personal satisfactions.

The stunning, ruthlessly ironic story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ does not take place in Africa but in marital hell; the expatriate persona, male and female, carries this hell with him or her wherever they go, the venue only brings it out like sweat. That’s what ‘Africa’ is there for.

I would not go so far as to quote from a Hemingway text, as some have done, that it is a place to ‘work the fat off’, a gym for the soul, for in that process there could be implied some sort of commitment to what those onlookers, the people, the Africans — nameless most of the time under the generic of nigger or native — are engaged in striving for: their liberation from the status of onlookers to the world of foreign power which determines their lives; some sort of commitment to the people’s freedom like Robert Jordan’s commitment to the Spanish people against fascism.

But the expatriates in the Africa narratives are not aware of the rising sense of counter-identity in the impassive face of the gun-bearer as he hands over the white hunter’s weapon, the subservience veneering the certainty that it will not be long before the power of the gun will be in black hands.

‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, one of the greatest short stories ever written, paradoxically has nothing to do with Africa; it is about death. It is the creative apogee of the painful, fearful exploration of the meaning of death that is the reverse side of Hemingway’s two love affairs, the preoccupation with death — one of his major themes — that has been so often projected, in his fiction, upon the Other: the agony of the bull, the matador gored in the belly, the big fish struggling on the hook, the wounded Spanish partisan shot in mercy, the peasant Anselmo left behind at his own request, to die, the splendid lion — like the bull, man’s innocent adversary — with half its head blasted away. The expatriate experiences death through these projections: now, at last, it comes to him — and it is a chosen death because it is an expatriate death, it happens elsewhere. ‘I would rather have been born here.’ I would rather die here.

I find it distasteful, to say the least, that one could think of approaching the unfinished novel Truth at First Light, as some seem eager to do, with the motive of ‘finding out’, deciding whether or not the experience of the particular expatriate hero in this novel that Ernest Hemingway so much wanted to write is intimately Hemingway’s own. It does not matter a damn in the achievements of Hemingway as one of those who has written our century, whether or not he slept with a Wakamba girl. It is an insult to his lifelong integrity to his art to regard his work in this shabby, prurient way.

Again, what matters to literature is to find whether, in the persona of the expatriate character, sleeping with the girl was just another service, part of the package deal the white client buys, another kill along with so many heads of this beast, so many skins of that, or whether it is the beginning of something new to him, some late-come realisation that all the gun-bearers and room boys, campfire cooks, and all those women and children viewed as a frieze among their huts, are, like this single girl, part of himself, of the human family, in which there are none who can opt out by expatriatism and leave behind the black men and women and children of home — America — while taking into his arms just one of those whose ancestors were shipped on the Middle Passage.

Toni Morrison has written with ominous measuredness: ‘My interest in Ernest Hemingway becomes heightened when I consider how much apart his work is from African-Americans.’¹⁰¹

Mine becomes heightened when I consider how far it is from Africans, and when I consider the revelation of the expatriate persona that can come only in the long reach of fiction. How there, the intuitions of imaginative power overcome self-protective inhibitions and justifications; how that persona assumes in a symbolic embrace of acceptance what he has evaded in his own country, his own society — that portion of the world primary to his being. The white hunter-writer did not have to go to Africa to recognise the existence of blacks as integral to his own existence, they were there where he came from, back in America. He did not have to wait to become aware — and only as a possibly bothersome interruption, by a straggling Mau-Mau raid, of the pleasant round of hunting and drinking and reading Simenon — of the revolt of blacks against racist domination gloved as patronage. The revolt was rising back in his natal United States of America. Hemingway’s titles were always brilliant, and in this case, what belonged to one novel is strangely apposite to the situation in another. To Have And Have Not: this perfectly expresses the embrace of the black girl by the expatriate persona.

‘The author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them.’¹⁰² (My italics.) Toni Morrison again: I take it she means the author has chosen to create these creatures rather than others, or his life experience has chosen him to make those choices. In each writer, the achievement is how far his/her imaginative discoveries of the mysteries of our existence has gone. This is how I see Hemingway’s creation of the expatriate persona in all its complexity, as part not only of the essential literature of but also a model produced by the twentieth century, the violent and bloody assembly line of our time during which we have invented so much, learned so much without learning how to live together and find that place in ourselves which would make this possible. On Ernest Hemingway’s centennial too much will be speculated about him, too much spoken about him, too much written about him, including my own part in this. When we go home, let us leave his life alone, it belongs to him, as he lived it. Let us read his books.

1999